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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23547091">FAIL SAFE</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persephone/pseuds/Persephone'>Persephone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes &amp; Shuri Friendship, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Is Steve's Mission, Bucky is out of cryo, Childhood Sweethearts, Crying, Developing Friendships, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Roller Coaster, Emotional Therapy Animals, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Healing, Heartache, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt/Comfort, Love Letters, M/M, Mind Games, Mindfuck, Missing You, Mystical Love, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Slash, Sam Wilson is So Done, Scientist Shuri (Marvel), Steve Rogers &amp; Sam Wilson Friendship, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Stubborn Steve Rogers, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, Touch-Starved, Touching, True Love, Unable to Cry, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Wakanda (Marvel), healing Bucky Barnes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:21:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>133,704</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23547091</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persephone/pseuds/Persephone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years from now, Bucky Barnes will disintegrate before Steve Rogers' eyes. An event which will come to be known as the Infinity War. After that, a quantum chance will arise for Steve Rogers to write - or rewrite - his own personal history.</p><p>Before that, well, a lot would have happened. Including that Bucky Barnes has been restored to life. Physically, and mentally. A journey of mystical healing for the broken vet that will refract through space and time . . . and leave Steve Rogers . . . awakened.</p><p>Steve will make his choice. This is the story of how Steve gets there.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. AWOKEN</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <span class="small">Soo.. <i>this</i> happened. This pairing is over thirty-years in the making for me. It really is something to grow up from that little starry-eyed girl and *clears throat* write for Marvel. I really hope you enjoy.</span>
</p><p><span class="small">🧡 Endless gratitude to my <b>✨beta <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/msilverstar">msilverstar</a></b> [from Chap. 5 onward, so all mistakes before &amp; after are my own!] You are making this journey even more special for me.</span> 🧡</p><div class="center">
  <p> </p>
  <p>    <br/></p>
</div>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A time before war... a time of healing.. and of finding yourself. Bucky is in Wakanda, awake.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    
  </p>
</div><hr/>
<p><br/>
</p>
<p>He, Bucky Barnes, was a pretty straightforward person.</p>
<p>He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the year before the First World War wrapped up. Ironic, seeing as he wasn’t a warlike person.</p>
<p>He hadn’t expected to be born to war, raised to war, exist to war. Most certainly not to die to war. </p>
<p>Never mind to wake up to war. The war to end all wars.</p>
<p>Growing up, that phrase had been a refrain. But he could attest a hundred years after, that those who had spoken had known nothing of Infinity.</p>
<p>He was a peaceful guy. He liked smart dames and sweet guys. And in the Brooklyn in which he had grown up, there had been plenty.</p>
<p>He went to war, in the one the history books would eventually decide was the Second World conflict, and woke to a world he had never, even in his wildest days of imagining the endless possibilities of the 20th Century — a common enough thing in the early part of it — have pulled together. </p>
<p>And he had certainly been that kid. The one to look upward, always, imagining a better future. </p>
<p>Very much unlike his best friend, and talk about eternal conflict, Steve Rogers.</p>
<p>When he found himself awoken one morning, freed of an imprisonment of mind which wasn’t anything like the comic books he had spent his childhood reading, he had been sure of only one thing. That he could not call Steve.</p>
<p>It was incredibly complicated, not the least because of what Hydra had made him do for fifty years, but it boiled down to an equally straightforward thing. It was impossible to call the one you loved when you were in your worst, and darkest hours. You wanted first to make yourself better for them. </p>
<p>Under normal circumstances, it was simply human nature.</p>
<p>With Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers, it was that to infinity.</p>
<p>≈≈</p>
<p>Hydra, it appeared, had left him with a corruption of touch. He was on the Quinjet, the month Steve, Sam and Natasha had spent secreting away Avengers busted from the Raft when it occurred to him.</p>
<p>There used to be meetings — Steve, Sam, Natasha, Clint, Scott, Vision, Wanda, and sometimes T’Challa who would rendezvous with them midair, to impart advice or intel on how next to proceed. Steve’s concern, even then, to track every last Chitauri-powered weapon which had since spilled into the wider world. Especially since SHIELD was apparently over and Nick Fury in the wind.</p>
<p>All of them standing around having discussions. The meeting had been going well, and he’d been sitting there in his near mindless state thinking of how often he’d rejected Natasha’s offer to administer his injured arm. Thinking on it and slow lying realizing he was developing an aversion to touch. </p>
<p>He had to be. Because if he closed his eyes, thought on it for a bit, he could sort of remember a time when he would have waltzed right into her arms. Faked a couple other ailments on top of that to keep her smiling a little longer at him while fixing him up.</p>
<p>But those days, on the Quinjet, while still trying to maintain a facade, he was instead shifting to the back of group meetings more and more each day, wishing to keep a distance from everyone.</p>
<p>Including <i>him.</i></p>
<p>But, as with all their lives, how well had <i>that</i> worked out.</p>
<p>The meeting had been going fine, T’Challa onboard with the newest intel on alien weapons from a mythical kingdom he would at the time simply blank on thinking about — well before he understood how seriously ironic life could really get.  Natasha and Sam taking point, Steve had been seated beside him. Which was the time he had been thinking about Natasha, on T’Challa, on all of them. That he was developing an aversion to touch. That the thought of even clasps on the shoulder seemed difficult to want. Sending his heart accelerating in ways that only matched being on the run. A heart acceleration that keyed a signal <i>to</i> run. He only had to juxtapose it with the kind smiles and words to know that Arnim Zola had programmed him well. Like a kind of lingering eff-you.</p>
<p>And that time, silently watching them, these heroes among whom he did not belong, he had wondered whether there was in fact an ever deeper trigger waiting to be set off. Whether the thought of safety anywhere but home base caused a cascade of neurons, forming in him a signal for imminent danger or death, even among friends. </p>
<p>He had no way to know. But it did feel like imminent danger and death, so that the mere thought of subjecting himself to their human touch felt about to jack his heart right out of his chest. </p>
<p>Not right then however, he’d thought, watching them. In fact, right then, he’d felt a rather deep calm. Totally at peace. Probably because distanced. </p>
<p>Either way, he’d felt everyone was safe then. Including him. And he hoped she had understood his apologetic glances after. Because who knew what would happen at the trip of a neuron cluster, whose function he had not, so far, had to suffer.</p>
<p>Then, eyes on Steve, T’Challa had lifted a finger, indicating needing a moment of Steve’s time. Sighing, Steve had squeezed his knee as Steve got up, telling him he’d find him later.</p>
<p>It was then that he realized Steve’s hand had been on his thigh the entire time.</p>
<p>It must have been a full hour after, in which he didn’t move. An hour of his mostly, at the time, empty mind simply directing his eyes to follow the one he recognized as his best friend.</p>
<p>Right after, Steve had come into the infirmary while he’d been cleaning his arm, getting ready to bandage. A slight struggle, but he always managed. </p>
<p>Placing a hand on his chest, calming his beating heart, and that time he had noticed, Steve had gently pushed until he was backed up and sitting on the sole infirmary bed, having entered with full intent at control. He hadn’t resisted. </p>
<p>Then Steve had taken his time, carefully and meticulously putting together his field dressing. Smiling when their eyes met. “Just like old times, right, Buck? Back with the unit?”</p>
<p>He hadn’t been able to respond, his heart tripping like picking up the heartbeats of a target on the run. Like his neurons were firing up. And he had closed his eyes, turning away, hoping that if he was triggered Steve would just put him out for good.</p>
<p>But nothing had happened. </p>
<p>It had been among the best field dressings he’d ever received, naturally. Steve had continued smiling at him. </p>
<p>And then leaning forward, Steve had gently kissed his cheek. It marked the first time anything like it had ever happened. And seemed to surprise only him.</p>
<p>“There,” Steve had said, as gently. And when he couldn’t say anything in response, Steve had slowly dropped his forehead against his, rubbing a little. “It’ll be okay, Buck. I promise.”</p>
<p>It wasn’t just that his mother’s name was Sarah. There seemed much more to it than that. An entire world more.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>And eight months ago, he’d been woken up in Wakanda.</p>
<p>And opening his eyes, it had been exactly like waking up from a lucid nightmare. He had felt it was premature. When Shuri had woken him, he had wanted to cry. His cryogenic sleep, his emotional salvation from being freed to know fully what he had done. Woken to her smiling over him, when he had wanted to shout and cry on seeing her, having prayed it would be another seventy years in the future. That they had locked him away, sparing him everyone and everything he had ever harmed or been obligated an explanation. </p>
<p>But most especially, the frail boy he had left behind in Brooklyn. </p>
<p>It had not been a world he could live in. </p>
<p>And it had all come like a giant tidal wave.</p>
<p>First, there had been tears. For days he had wept. Cried and cried. Thought of <i>him</i> and cried. And God, what pain. Only to never have a single tear drop. Struggling to get tears out, only frying his already fried brain. Succeeding only in excruciating scratches and lacerations to his mind. Who would have known that being able to cry was a sign of healing. He had almost drowned in those tears that would not come. </p>
<p>And soon enough, he hadn’t meant figuratively.</p>
<p>But before that, before he had been permitted to begin his healing in the place he would come to know intimately, there had been rage. </p>
<p>Among the Wakandans, that period had been at most bemusing. Time and time again, they had thrown him out into the wilderness, to rage util exhaustion. Out there, they had told him, he could feel free. Those times, he had dragged himself back, hotter than hellfire and drenched in sweat in places he didn’t know could sweat, to find a wonderfully cool bath and a big meal awaiting. And a party. In Wakanda, there was always a party somewhere in town. When he had repeatedly come back in one piece, they had thrown him a few.</p>
<p>After rage had come anguish — as pure, as painful. “Describe,” the Wariza, the ancient Women who were overseeing his healing had demanded. He hadn’t. Dropped instead from a Mag Wave-Rider, he had chosen a different form of initial cleansing. A more familiar one. Plummeting head-first from the skies through a bright, shining atmosphere before a deployed canopy would break his fall into a gentle one, he had let the Earth call to him. Falling hard, like a shot from heaven, suddenly understanding the central plight of Lucifer.</p>
<p>But the anguish too, the guilt, had passed. Passed, to find himself still standing. Alive, and in present times. Then had come a live-wire of feeling. Post-Hydra’s triggers, his sensations dialed all the way up. Everything real, everything intense. </p>
<p>There bad begun his healing.</p>
<p>Led by Shuri—since besides his innate magnanimity, T’Challa had really not fully dealt with his father’s death. So despite assurance to Captain America himself, the King hadn’t quite given him the time of day on his awakening. Definitely not ready to sit for tea with the one whom for so long he’d believed had killed his father.</p>
<p>Odd as it might sound, he nonetheless considered it a win. The alternatives had not really been exactly in his favor.</p>
<p>That first morning after that cycle, arm secured in a cushy sling, colorful and stylish, and so light and comfortable he seemed to be wearing nothing, he’d managed to smile at his reflection — opaque wall of uniformly applied chemical that presented 99.99% of an original wave signal, she’d explained to him, whatever that meant. Only, he knew the thing he was seeing himself reflected in made the world <i>mirror</i> in the outside world seem like a poor prank.</p>
<p>She’d also had a new titanium-vibranium arm awaiting him. He’d tightened his lips and shaken his head. She hadn’t argued. Just dropped the lid on the case, indicated that he follow. So he had followed female-Peter Parker out into the wilderness. That was, if your idea of a wilderness was a Technicolor paradise. </p>
<p>Lush and trilling with birdsong. That first morning going in with her, he’d half expected to see fig-leaf covered dames slinking out of the underbrush, whispering his name. Ha, he wished. And there, feeling pleased; feeling more himself to be thinking of dames in the midst of his internal hurricane.</p>
<p>Then the Queen’s household, whether out of obligation or pity, he still wasn’t sure, had taken him down to the Waters of the Ancestors. </p>
<p>Shuri had walked him out onto a cliff face. He hadn’t even been aware of the rise in terrain.</p>
<p>On that walk, he’d been told the story that would later play such a part in giving him a re-knitted mind for his future. There, he was told, waiting to be plunged into the Waters, upon the coming of the Takers from the Lands Beyond Kush, all of Wakanda had consolidated their past. There, they said, he would find cleansing.</p>
<p>The Lands Beyond Kush, he came to know, was their way of explaining who and what lay, and had happened beyond the fall of the Egyptians, over whom the nations beyond and around Wakanda, but not Wakanda itself, had felt necessary at one time or another to conquer. That for millennia, Egypt—the place he had only ever been taught as the home of pyramids and ancient tombs—had been the pride and hub of all that was East African. Kingdoms from all over the Continent sending envoys to its courts, pouring into its economy and bolstering its capacity. But once Egypt was taken, once the betrayal of the Kushites, straight north of Wakanda, was known, the Wakandans had declared a firm no to that. And so had not allowed the Kushites, nor the colonizing Phoenicians, nor the later Greeks, Persians, the Macedonians, nor Rome, to make it south beyond Kush. So that Kush became all that was proximate in their history, past the academics they taught their children of the Lands Beyond. So that by the time Portugal and Spain, Magellan and Christopher Columbus, ruled the oceans, as they’d been taught in school and later Army training, to the Wakandans that seemed like yesterday and of little interest. Mere <i>kah’rus</i>—Johnny Come Latelys, as they were called Stateside.</p>
<p>In her teenage eyes he had seen the same manic light of blazing logic, science, and human potential as in those of his captors. Except that she had been brought up humanely and could care when her experiments were in emotional pain, in need and in human anguish. In need of a <i>degewor</i>, a shot of whiskey, and there she would pull back and stop with a wide, teenage smile. By then he knew that of assistance to super-powered beings were the geniuses of the Starks, one of whom he could count as a victim of his own destruction, the doctor known as Strange, a “mister” called Fantastic, and firsthand, a kid from Queens named Peter Parker. Seventy years ago, he would think sometimes, with a smile, had he walked into an Army recruiting station — oh, forget that,  the Pentagon itself, with such information, he would have probably spent those seven decades locked in a room inside the complex being probed.</p>
<p>That day, of his rebirth into their society—for mourning, while accommodated into community, the potential destructions of anguish or rage were not and required isolation — she had laughed at his shocked, skeptical gaze, staring down the cliff at the Waters into which he was expected to . . .  What had she said? He’d turned to her.</p>
<p>“Jump!” she cried, twice clapping her hands, then doing a little dance. Then turning, began clambering back down the cliff face, down to the shores. Apparently to . . . witness him resurface? Hopefully resurface. The fall wasn’t what would kill him. On missions he’d jumped knowing earth and rock were all that awaited, so water was nothing but a fall into his bed. But once down there—</p>
<p>And looking down, he had heard the voices down there. And soon experienced the plunge which had been like striking a match against his mind.</p>
<p>How strange, for a boy from Brooklyn. To stand on the cliffs of what he did know was the Rift Valley, and look down and see not merely waterfalls or lapis lakes as were on maps, but Waters which appeared to have no bottom and seemed to call his name.</p>
<p><i>You, the Winter Soldier,</i> the voices said in more Wakanda than he understood in conscious life. <i>You the White Wolf. You will come to us. And we will keep you safe.</i></p>
<p>And he had turned away. Breathless. Frightened. But determined.</p>
<p>He had fallen. Leapt and fallen.</p>
<p>On that first morning in the Waters, his tears had come.</p>
<p>That morning of his resurrection into their society just as the sun rose, turning the world blue and yellow, he had finally cried for the person he had once been. Cried for the wars that had left shattered bodies like his. For the generations of dead left on its battlefields and in its ravines.</p>
<p>For the people whose lives he had taken. For the darkness inside his head that seemed to allow no light. He’d cried while Queen Ramonda held him lying limp in her arms, resting on the shores of the Waters and cradling him, rocking him, far from her own children and subjects. </p>
<p>Crying in her arms because no one should have experienced the things he had. “It happened to you,” the Queen had whispered. “And you should accept that.”</p>
<p>So he had opened his eyes to the ancient women of the Wariza staring down at him. A sight that might otherwise . . . <i>should</i> have instigated fear. The old, drugged up women were not exactly the grandma types. But he had merely looked on. For the women too had seen much, and his deepest struggles to them were but the latest instructions from the Queen.</p>
<p>Crying, embarrassed and crying, he had thought, <i>Don’t let him down, don’t let him down. Find a way to be strong.</i></p>
<p>The Wariza had come after for him, these old women who didn’t know the name of any living Wakandan, not even the name of the King. Who didn’t speak the common language and didn’t care. Holding him down while he had struggled for life and doing so with as much human dignity as possible. Not wanting to look desperate and pathetic in their eyes, for this was ritual, not murder. Nor in the eyes of the Wakandans gathered above.</p>
<p>For his rages had garnered him fans, and now warriors congregated to watch him rise or die. His most pressing thoughts after a fifty-year reign of terror — that he not look bad before his colleagues. </p>
<p>But already, looking down on him from the cliffs as if at a floundering fish, only deserving of care and understanding, the Wakandans had looked worried. Expressing that concern, since the Waters amplified all of life: Was he not a human being and should he not have more courage in the face of destruction. And if he did not, should they not, his fellow warriors in arm, help in finding a smoother path to his peace. A way out into the Serengeti perhaps, where he could run with his kind until human once more.</p>
<p>The Wariza had ignored them. And he was having none of that. Done with him, he had crawled back onto the shores, tired and weak as that floundering fish — not instantly cleansed, for that was not how it worked, but no longer torn apart from inside. And Queen had held him.</p>
<p>There had begun a re-knitting of his soul, which was the start.</p>
<p>It had been a chore locating Shuri afterward, having to ignore her exaggerated, shocked looks and cries of “White Wolf! You are here! Who’d have imagined!”</p>
<p>His, had certainly been, and still was, a terrible struggle. But Shuri was, explaining to him that his pain and anguish was <i>Nothing but a highlight pen to the ancestors!</i> and that he needed to pipe down about those pain and struggles. Which he had never actually vocalized to her. But, she claimed, she could hear his neurons going like a poorly connected circuit, screeching at her all day. She told him to stop his struggle and allow the space, because he was home in Wakanda now, and the Ancestors had already lived through anything either of them could imagine. <i>Worse!</i> because current times were <i>good</i> in comparison to the ancient world in which the Ancestors had to operate.</p>
<p>“People always think it was so wonderful! They show you all those old depictions and make it look so colorful, and cute, and just beautiful. But you know,” said with her head turned to him, dipped — she was in her lab at her consoles at the time. “It wasn’t all that. Wireless communication for instance was only discovered in the last five hundred years. So think of it, if you wanted to send a message across the country in those days, you were shit out of luck! Don’t tell anyone I said shit, Bucky.”</p>
<p>“But the Ancestors themselves, you know, they were just like you and me right now! They too saw the world ending and wondered <i>how?!</i> Why??! And they still had to come together and deal with it, even with their limited science.”</p>
<p>Calmly, he had asked, “Shuri, is the world ending?”</p>
<p>Then she had shut her mouth. Whatever her mother had told her, for this was almost two years out from the days of Thanos and what would later be known as the Infinity War, she had closed her mouth. After which she would say neither come nor go, as the Wakandans would say, on the subject.</p>
<p>But he had been Tirade in the days of the Assassin; the bringer of war. He had been the coming storm. And seeing where she had not looked, at him, he had known.</p>
<p>To her mother, to her brother—to the Queen and to the reigning King of Wakanda—she just a kid. But even if he had never been her, he had loved a kid like her once, a boy like her who could see the world and not fear but take it on. It wasn’t about genius, it was about person. And she was <i>that.</i> And so she had somehow, unexpectedly, taken his heart. And with her, he felt it was safe. A reboot of the lives he had taken and not lived.</p>
<p>On that cliff that morning, before turning to scamper down the rock face, she had stopped and looked at him, and blinking, had laughed. High and happy, like all Wakandan young.</p>
<p>“Steven Rojaz <i>will</i> come for you,” she had cried, in total, absolute confidence, apropos of nothing. “Watch and see if I’m wrong!” And, clambering down, “White Wolf, he will come for you.”</p>
<p>Eight months now. Since then, his healing had been underway. </p>
<p>The triggers were gone, Shuri had said, explaining again and again what she had done—but it was still too complex to understand. His memories were okay, she’d finished, encouragingly. Just as she had promised they would be. Everything was exactly where it should be.</p>
<p>He could have told her or anyone that the triggers were gone. There was silence in his head. No unknowable impulses like subtle clicks whose source he could never trace. Never root out on his own, even when his self acutely wished it. He could also have told her that his memories were intact; no longer disassociated. </p>
<p>And since, it had been an ocean of tears, as an odd thing had happened. His mind had moved anything and everything to do with his future, to do with Steve, into encasing spheres of water in this dreaming mind.</p>
<p>In those spheres were feelings of joy, of a perfect future. But in his dreams when he tried to touch them, they moved away. As if teasing him. Sometimes he could, touch him through a membrane of watered silk, and known such joy. But most times he just woke to the dawn weeping into his pillow.</p>
<p>But he wanted healing more than anything. Whether his frenetic, fucked up brain — scrambled like sizzling, over-fried eggs, impossibly put back together — had wanted it, he had. </p>
<p>And he had left the palace complex, had found a home by the forest in the countryside.</p>
<p>Had gotten a small goat herd.</p>
<p>“Elileh,” the Wakandan of the River Tribe who came to buy his goat’s milk had called the spheres.</p>
<p>For a long time he’d thought it to be the name of something sacred. A god or ancestor. Why wouldn’t it be, after the story he’d helplessly told her of being unable to touch inside his dreams. It had been a bad morning, and she had come slightly earlier than usual.</p>
<p>“Elileh,” the Wakandan of the River Tribe who came to buy his goat’s milk had called the spheres.</p>
<p>For a long time he’d thought it to be the name of something sacred. A god or ancestor. Why wouldn’t it be, after the story he’d helplessly told her of being unable to touch inside his dreams. It had been a bad morning, and she had come slightly earlier than usual.</p>
<p>Then the leather buyer who came to buy his passed on goat  had heard him reverently mutter it.</p>
<p>When upon the leather buyer brushing hands with him, he’d pulled back. Looking probably as startled as he felt, since he was sure as a well oiled carbine that people didn’t react that way to grazing fingers with a guy as good looking, the young leather buyer then just watched.</p>
<p>Hoarsely by way of explanation, he had said, “Elileh.” And again, “Elileh.”</p>
<p>“Elileh ‘ka?” the leather buyer asked, face tightening with both confusion and— what was that, exactly. . . a funny face?</p>
<p>Not sure what the question was — shouldn’t the word have been explanation enough? — he quieted further.</p>
<p>“Da’ ami,” he said slowly, haltingly. <i>Mine. Belongs to me.</i></p>
<p>“What’s yours?” the leather buyer asked.</p>
<p>He’d repeated the word. Repeated, <i>He’s mine.</i></p>
<p>“Elileh,” the leather buyer repeated, as slowly. “The god . . . it’s yours?”</p>
<p>He’d nodded. Said again in Common Wakandan <i>The god. He’s mine.</i></p>
<p>The leather buyer didn’t say anything for quite some time, a crinkle still in his brow. Seemingly intent on putting together every stitch of his broken Common Wakanda to find a thread of lingual communication he could understand. He gave him the time. When life itself had become a seventy-year suspension fluid, patience, he had discovered, was to be had in near universal quantities.</p>
<p>“Who told you this?” the leather buyer asked, now switched to English. </p>
<p>“Beh Elileh. . .” <i>that Elileh. . .</i> and the young man stopped once more, restarted, still in Wakandan. “That . . . the god is yours.”</p>
<p>He named her.</p>
<p>And then the leather buyer let out a cackle so wild and high pitched that it took a moment before the guy was able to stop himself. But eyes sparkling, teeth no less so, because in the young man’s amusement, he was seeing all of them, the amusement finally came under check. And was he also seeing . . . yeah. There appeared to be tears of laughter in the young man’s eyes.</p>
<p>“What’s Elileh?” the leather buyer asked him in English. “What’s . . . your god.”</p>
<p>He wouldn’t say.</p>
<p>The goat milk buyer had come to his cottage and he had found himself talking when he shouldn’t have. Telling her much more than he’d been prepared to. Probably because on that early morning she’d come, he’d had his worse dream yet. And she had spoken to him of dreams of <i>Elileh,</i> “of the god.” And it had made sense to him.</p>
<p>Now he suspected she’d just been some dumbass teenager like he had feared and had said some bullshit to him that he had needed badly to hear, in a language whose nuances he was still trying to comprehend. </p>
<p>Then the leather buyer was laughing outright, so hard the guy was having a hard time holding it together. “Was it Ilams?” the young Wakandan asked, gasping. “Was she the one who came to buy your goat’s milk?”</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, it had been. He nodded.</p>
<p>The leather buyer all but fell of the iroko-wood stool he had very proudly carved himself. Wakanda was easily two centuries ahead of the rest of the world in terms of tech, even Tony Stark tech, but he would live and die by wool and leather and grass and animal’s milk. There was a comfort here he could not put into words. Only waited to tell his guy about.</p>
<p>But the kid was about to literally die on his stool. Gasping, the leather buyer said, “Do you know Akan?” At his shake of head, “Anansi?” Still shaking his head. “Do you know Loki?”</p>
<p>At that he nodded. “I’ve heard of him. He’s the brother to— I’ve heard of him.”</p>
<p>“The trickster god?”</p>
<p>“I said I’ve heard of him,” he said tightly.</p>
<p>“That’s Ilams!” the buyer cried, lifting and wagging his finger. “Do <i>not</i> take anything she says <i>agu-ara.</i>” <i>On the surface.</i></p>
<p>“She wasn’t talking about <i>surface matters,</i>” he said defensively.</p>
<p>The leather buyer took a breath. “I know,” the young man said gently in English. “I know. But Elileh means garbage. As in, actually. It could also mean your dick. She’s just playing with you. It’s what she does. Your dreams are dreams about your dick is basically what she told you. Which, maybe, correct? I don’t know. If there’s a question you want answering, you are better off speaking to the Wariza overseeing your healing. They will speak universal truth to you. <i>Not,</i>” the young man said emphatically, “a village girl here to take your goat’s milk. She will just take your goat’s milk.” Then there was a pause. “Especially,” the leather buyer added, “because you do seem in need of a <i>wolaneh.</i>” A “listening to.”</p>
<p>He had been smarting since his leather buyer had started speaking. That broad. Up in there she’d been, hovering her forefinger over his forehead, talking about, this was his third eye and how she could read his dreams.</p>
<p>This kid probably knew as much about. . . well—metaphysics. . . as his goats did. Or that milk girl. But at least the guy knew to keep it real.</p>
<p>The leather buyer swept him a look. </p>
<p>“The White Wolf,” the young man said, confidently, in English, head tipped to display a physical appreciation. Biting his lip, and letting his warm eyes drench him. “You are known everywhere. As one whose heart has been trampled by the beasts of the far Savannah, and survived, you are known. But I would never have expected that the beast was a man.”</p>
<p>“He’s not a beast.”</p>
<p>“But he is a man.”</p>
<p>To which he said nothing. If only.</p>
<p>Otherwise why had he opened his eyes into a dark world, and a future, in which he had seen <i>his</i> boy become a being he could not reach. Was <i>that</i> the trajectory of a man? A bullet fired that did not do what was expected.</p>
<p>He himself was living proof of what happened when you got in the way of such a projectile.</p>
<p>“What you are experiencing,” the young man said. “Is not <i>Elileh,</i> but <i>Ab-hara.</i>”</p>
<p>He stared blankly. “But you just said—”</p>
<p>“Actually, I didn’t say anything. But I’m explaining now. Does it feel as if there are things you cannot touch, and yet—”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he whispered hoarsely.</p>
<p>“And then in your dreams—”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he repeated. “Just say it. Please.”</p>
<p>The young leather buyer nodded sagely. “What you are feeling is <i>Ab-hara.</i> Not <i>Elileh,</i> which as I said, trash. And until he touches you, you will never know joy. This is a cruse.”</p>
<p>“It’s not a curse.”</p>
<p>“But you are not listening, White Wolf. The Queen Mother has tasked us all to look after you. So we do. And I say to you. All of Wakanda, all of Great Mother Africa, will remain a stasis in which you exist. To which your entire life to this point cannot compare. And I say this not having known a minute of your life, yet I tell you in all confidence. If you chose to stay here and close your eyes, you will eventually find peace as you have never known. But joy of existence, of life,” and here the young leather buyer leaned forward, lifting an eyebrow at him. “<i>Elileh,</i> will never come to you.”</p>
<p>“I’ll never experience . . . trash?” he asked.</p>
<p>The Wakandan smiled. “Yeah,” he said, eyes dimming, voice reduced to a warm croak. “You will never experience the joys of. . . <i>trash.</i>”</p>
<p>He waited until the leather buyer left. Not wishing to look completely stupid, he had maintained a hard sale, driving a harder bargain than usual and likely making less currency than he might have. Still, he had gotten enough to care for his tiny herd for several months, of which he was immensely proud, for having kept them alive and thriving for nearly year — much longer than his neighbors had wagered. How many of his kind had lived to even see such a thing — to have sustained life, and for so long, much less claim it as an occupation. A herd which included a rather special pair of married goat he’d named Brooklyn and Dodger.</p>
<p>So ever since Shuri had strolled and skipped him to the bottom of the lush green hills — of the kind he had only ever glimpsed passing through Bavaria in the back of a deuce and a half; happy to show him the cottage that seemed out of a fond fantasy, complete with his own twin goats and the expectation that he would maintain them and increase his responsibilities — well, since then, he had taken his life as seriously as a person could.  </p>
<p>While the leather buyer wandered off with probably much less leather than guy had anticipated, raw hide piled high on a vibranium-powered anti-grav Red Wagon type thing he and Steve would have killed for as kids, he withdrew into his cottage. It was already evening and the sun was coming down, and Wakanda was ablaze not in reds and pinks and golds like everywhere else, but in the jewel blue that was lapis, that was the Waters of the Ancestors, in the reds that were the rubies of the earth, strong and eternal, and in the whites that were the alabaster that were the eyes of the Panther — the effects of the Protection Dome over the Kingdom.</p>
<p>Looking from the hillside toward the setting sun, it occurred to him just then that lapis, ruby and alabaster were also the colors of the man whom his boy had become.</p>
<p>His dangerous beast of the Savannah, caught inside a globule of watered silk. Despite himself, it made him smile. </p>
<p>He didn’t go inside. Just leaned against the jamb of the only home he had ever known as an adult. Waking sometimes to be asked by the kids of the neighborhood whether he wanted protective Ancestra patterns on his face, hearing that the Wolf was in need of healing.</p>
<p>Against this adobe-earth jamb of his home, he leaned, thinking.</p>
<p>Every day, he listened to his communiqués.</p>
<p>That morning, he had listened to the latest one.</p>
<p>“How are ya, Buck. Busy runnin’ ‘round with Sam and Natasha still. Tons of Chitauri-powered weapons out there still, kinda stressful, but we’re trackin’ em. Just done clearin’ the Mideast, headin’ into Asia. Wishin’ you were here.” Steve said it as <i>heeya,</i> even though years of a life neither of them could have predicted had smoothed out the dips and rises of both their native accents. But never when they were alone and talking to each other. “Anyways, know Shuri’s workin’ hard on fixin’ ya right up. Can’t wait ta get the news they woke you up. Can’t wait ta see ya again, Buck. Later.”</p>
<p>Many nights since that field dressing on the Quinjet, layered comfortably on his bed, he had endlessly replayed the moment in his head. Again and again, trapped now inside a globe. Steve kissing him. Him believing his heart would somehow survive.</p>
<p>When the time came, when he was healed enough, brave enough, he would ask Shuri to take him to a Comms Hub, where Wakandans sent messages to the <i>boh’hees,</i> to the Lands Beyond. And he would ask her to put him online. There he would wait until a communiqué started coming through, and instead of letting it go to message, he would tap answer. And say, <i>I’m awake, Steve.</i></p>
<p>Speaking of . . .</p>
<p>He turned as his communicator started singing wildly with a truly crazy ringtone, Shuri on the beat, as she would say.</p>
<p>Probably another party. His smile widened. He certainly liked the glitter and the light shows.</p>
<p>Withdrawing from his doorway, he went over to the ebony side-table he had carved himself. For now setting aside the sun outside — the colors of the shield with the star, and of those movements which had been, for the first time in their lives, perfectly in sync with his own.</p>
<p>At the ebony side table, he picked up his communicator.</p>
<p>His fear of touch would go nowhere, he knew. Not after the Quinjet, and definitely not after what he remembered of their actual parting there in Wakanda.</p>
<p>Not after the memories that were coming free and clear of the feelings Bucky Barnes had carried all his life for Steve Rogers. </p>
<p>Definitely not.</p>
<p>It was nice. To be free and clear, of anguish and rage. To simply remember his own life.</p>
<p>This wasn’t going to be a phase. This was Bucky Barnes of Brooklyn, asserting his right to life.</p>
<p>But those were <i>strong things for another day,</i> as the Wakandans would say. For now, he merely checked his communicator and answered Shuri’s call.</p>
<p>He no longer wished to cry. And he still feared being touched. And dreams— well, dreams would never be enough.</p>
<p>But one day he would be ready. Then he would answer his call with a single one of his own. <i>Steve,</i> he would tell him. <i>I’m awake.</i></p>
<p>•</p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. NOT AWOKEN</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bucky's awake, in Wakanda dealing with all kinds of slick and slippery thoughts. Steve is unaware that Bucky's awake. On the Helicarrier, Steve is sending Bucky missing-you messages. [Note: introducing Marvel's Richard Jones - my version of the character.]</p>
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</p><p>“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Natasha told him, always knowing, always confident. “He’ll wake up and then he’ll answer you.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”</p><p>“It’s been barely a year. What he went through? If it took a decade to scrub I wouldn’t be surprised. I tend not to assume about gods and mythical kingdoms, but I’d be shocked if even the Wakandans could bring him through clean in under a year.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>She turned to him, watching him while strapping on her stun gloves and tipping the corner of her lips. “But you gotta keep sending those messages, don’tcha.”</p><p>He didn’t answer, tapping at the glowing consoles until he was sure the message was being sent—on a secure, immediate delivery. For eyes only.</p><p><i>Ah, Bucky.</i> He missed him something fierce. If only he could put into words the things tearing through him. That cryo-sleep thing had his heart racing. But this wasn’t about him. T’Challa had said, and Shuri had said, and he’d had no choice but to believe. Bucky needed him to be strong about this, and his mission right now was to be just that for his best buddy.</p><p>But what a dumb word for it—<i>buddy.</i> Ever since getting pulled from the ice, speed reading through a small mountain of books on nearly all aspects of the War, the thing that had stayed with him the most was that phrase, the Greatest Generation. Each book mentioning it like some kind of talisman. And all it had done was flag his attention that he had in fact not read a single book <i>on</i> said the Greatest Generation. On what came after.</p><p>Society after the War was the information he’d been lacking, and in reading those books he’d found his eye-openers. Chronicles of the lives of young men who’d been exactly that, buddies before the War, but who afterward had struggled to define the relationships they had developed with the men with whom they had served during the War. Returning to find that the America they had left was shockingly hardly different from the one they had came home to, despite a world war. Yet everything was different. In 1918, the Western world as a whole had been a world in transition—accepting change as the new world order. In 1945, <i>America</i> had been born, a society whose specialness and rightness had just been stamped in platinum in decisively winning a war against evil. Nineteen-forty-five-USA had been a world that had wanted nothing to seem less, everything to be more. Only, the kind of more that was acceptable. Many soldiers had returned and spoken nothing of their turmoil. Had married women, who themselves had spent the War at home forging a changed world for themselves—one in which they could work and create and live free of the dictates of a male-ordered society. But post-War, making up experiences which neither side had been able to distill into words. Nothing having changed, when everything had, America had determined that everyone pair up. All of them who had come back broken, changed, destroyed from the War, now pulled away from the men who had saved their lives, had cried and died alongside them—these young men to now be the brave faces of heroism for the silver screen, the women to be baby dolls who exactly appreciated such men. Everybody locked in with things unsaid, but silently.</p><p>Reading those books, it was sometimes very easy to imagine that he and Bucky were the lucky ones. And to realize just how messed up a thought that was.</p><p>But often he’d pondered just how his own life might have been in that post-War era. Had he and Peggy made it through the War. Had he not lost Buck, and if Buck too had found a girl to settle down with. Which, he had to admit, was asking a lot of Bucky Barnes. But if it had happened, how might their lives have been. Full of things incapable of easy expression? What would Buck have been to him post-War. A . . . <i>buddy?</i></p><p>“He’s your man,” Sam later told him. Making him look over at him, halfway across the cargo bay of the Helicarrier. Their Quinjet had rendezvoused with it, this Helicarrier on which Nick Fury had risen through the clouds around Sokovia like salvation itself, vaguely talking about having “pulled it out of moth balls.” As convincing an explanation as “<i>green</i> skies smilin’ at me.” On further inquiry, he’d been told that the Helicarrier had been salvaged, reprogrammed and put into operation by none other than Tony Stark himself, under the command of Maria Hill during the time she worked for Stark Industries. Also as convincing. He had his suspicions as to what was really going on, particularly following the damage done by the Sokovia Accords to the very concept of the Avengers Initiative. One thing he knew about Nick Fury, Nick appreciated his works getting broken up even less than Howard Stark’s son did.</p><p>Not that it mattered beyond that, as for nearly a year, the Helicarrier had proven god-sent as a transfer hub for the Chitauri-powered weapons they’d been chasing down across the globe following their smashing of Rumlow’s operation. Which, unfortunately, had only sent the weapons into the hands of leaderless, wannabe power-player cells.</p><p>“What?” he asked Sam.</p><p>“He’s . . . your . . . man,” Sam said, slowly, emphatically. </p><p>“What, like. . . my girl?”</p><p>“Exactly.”</p><p>For a while he said nothing, checking the integrity of the weapons and crates, as Nick, Maria, and probably Tony, but definitely the cargo bay chief tech, had made clear needed to be done with extreme care. She, the chief tech, had been talking very hesitantly, to superheroes, her tight expression told them she knew, but superheroes too had to obey rules. He’d appreciated her patience, and was now logging data precisely as she’d instructed.</p><p>“Exactly, what?” he asked Sam.</p><p>“Exactly that. He’s like your girl now. I don’t know if you know this, but at all the military academies across the nation we’re taught all about you guys from the Greatest Generation. But they never tell us anything, you know, gritty. But you take the time and read those personal letters and diaries and you understand some stuff.”</p><p>“Oh, really. Now I regret not having written a single one.”</p><p>“Personal letters you mean, right? That’s because you had no one to write to,” Sam told him. “Your folks were dead, no friends expect the bullies waiting for you in alleys and the recruiting agents waiting to hate you on sight. No one except James Buchanan Barnes.”</p><p>Not ready to discuss it, he checked off more figures he was only post-awakening recognizing as mathematics. But eventually, said, “Yeah?”</p><p>“Oh, fuck yeah,” Sam said easily. Then, coughing, cleared his throat, and said, “Oh, heck yeah.”</p><p>Smiling, despite himself, he said magnanimously, “Go on.”</p><p>“Go on where? You had no one to write letters home to. Guys had girls, family, you name it. But Bucky was your everything. Your man, your girl, your brother. And he was there in the war with you. So for you, no letters to write.”</p><p>“I couldn’t write my local councilor? Sounds like you’ve been at the exhibit. And I’m pretty sure I—”</p><p>“The <i>exhibition,</i>” Sam said, voice rising like he had mispronounced the title of the Grand Pooh-Bah. “Buddy. It’s the Captain America Second World War Permanent Exhibition at the Smithsonian. Get it right.”</p><p>He couldn’t help laughing, now at the front of the stacked crates and all but done inventorying.  “Ohhkay, fanboy. So you’ve been to the exhibition. And you’re a fan. So you must know that my Brooklyn city councilor was pretty into the goings-on of his constituents in the war. And that I wrote him at least a coupl’a times.”</p><p>“Listen to you,” Sam said, chuckling. “You talk about your people and your accent comes out.”</p><p>Before Sam could start imitating, he said, “Yeah, so if you know so much about the <i>permanent exhibition,</i> then you know I did write letters to my councilor, and to his successor. Since he didn’t win reelection, even though every voter in that district knew he should have. But God knows, you can’t fight City Hall.”</p><p>Sam laughed under his breath for reasons he didn’t understand, and then was dismissively waving the hand holding the little translucent pad Stark Industries had supplied them. A pad over which he had his worries. Stark Industries under Tony Stark could be trusted as much as a bottle of arsenic to cure ailments.</p><p>“You playing dumb is not cute,” Sam said. “You should just know that. Natasha doesn’t think so, and neither do I. Even though she likes fucking with—” Sam cleared his throat, hard. “She likes messing with you. A lot more than I do.”</p><p>“Yeah?” he said distractedly, at this point over the conversation itself, which didn’t seem to have a point, and just looking forward to a simple lie-down in his bunk.</p><p>“Steve.”</p><p>It took a full minute later before he realized Sam had called his name. Because in that time he had finished checking integrities, letting out a heavy sigh and telling Sam they could give themselves a pat on the back, and, actually, could go get a couple of hot vodkas before crashing, and to save the sass about him not being able to get drunk. It was after thinking then saying all of this, and looking up because Sam hadn’t responded, that he realized that Sam had spoken quite some time ago.</p><p>“Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” he apologized. “I’m real sorry, I was caught up in this.”</p><p>“Do you even remember what we were talking about?”</p><p>“Yeah, I have total recall. So, going backwards, you were saying Natasha likes to mess with me, a lot more than you do, and that me playing dumb is not cute. Before that, that a Brooklyn accent comes out of me when I’m comfortable talking about my people, then prior to, it was about the exhibition at the Smithsonian, precipitated by you seeming to know that I hadn’t written any personal letters during the War like everyone else. What, in your opinion, was because I had no girl back home, but that Bucky was there with me in the war.”</p><p>Sam stared in dead silence at him.</p><p>“You’re pale,” he said to him, surprised. “I can actually see it. You have no glow at all to your skin.”</p><p>Sam blinked. “Is that like . . . a superpower you just discovered? Or were you always able to do that?”</p><p>Laughing, he set the Stark tab on the weapons casing. The chief’s techies would do the rest for inventory. “What if I told you I could always do that.”</p><p>Sam’s fixed eyes hadn’t moved, clearly going back on one or more moments in D.C. bars that might not be the friendliest for total recall.</p><p>“Don’t get distracted,” he told him, indicating toward the exit. “You were telling about how Buck’s my man.”</p><p>—</p><p>While Sam talked him through his need to breathe and accept it all; how, yeah, back in the day of Captain America things like this weren’t out in the open, but that things were different were now and how he could just be himself with Bucky, and you know, “Just love on the guy,” and him, feet up and ankles crossed on the spare seat next to Sam, nodding deeply. Sam was way passed the signpost for tipsy but he just felt warm and to him it was all pretty funny, when he flicked a look across the Helicarrier’s canteen and saw Richard Jones.</p><p>Rick was passing through, he already knew, needing transport on an assignment for some organization Rick had supposedly recently created. Yeah, right. If there really was no SHIELD left, then no question Rick was on assignment for Maria. Which was just another way for saying Nick Fury. Yet neither Sam nor Natasha knew who Rick was, except in passing. Merely as a name in a database.</p><p>As a name in a database, Rick was a defunct SHIELD operative, homeless like Natasha or Clint, but prior-to the destruction of SHIELD, having been based conveniently on the other side of the planet. But of no immediate consequence to any of them, even Natasha hadn’t been interested in giving more than a cursory glance over Richard Jones. With no more than obligatory remarks when Rick had joined them on a blink-and-you-miss-it docking in Yemen.</p><p>“Bearing intel,” had been Rick’s story.</p><p>“For whom,” had been Natasha’s question, at which Rick had returned her a glance, understanding her real question. “Story not for civilian ears. Not unlike yours.”</p><p>“You don’t know anything about my story.”</p><p>Rick had smirked deeply. “We all have <i>skills,</i> Natasha Romanoff. In this new era, knowledge to purvey. Not to talk of networks to plug into. This is neither the time for judging nor for <i>figuring out.</i>”</p><p>Natasha had reigned in her irritated face. But it had been hate on sight. He could think of few in his experience with her that had extracted a face like that from her. He’d said nothing. The rest with Rick had been routine and filler. Days on board and Rick had been nothing, done nothing except exhibit the normal frustrations of ex-SHIELD operatives. Only, too calculatedly. To him, failing at the otherwise normal things that marked a genuinely frustrated soldier. Not that he knew much about how spies were trained to foil detection, but even as an instant distraction, sent in to turn heads left while the real thing landed right, Rick wasn't good at it. And what’s more, wasn’t bothering to cover that he wasn’t. Rosters and morning checkins and Rick would just stand in formation, appearing no more or less than a frustrated, defunct SHIELD agent. . . until he happened to walk by. Then Rick would have to lower his head to hide his incredibly rude smile.</p><p>Yeah, none of the Avengers knew Rick, but he did. Rick was former SHIELD, all right, no questions there. And as with other field agents, he’d gotten to know Rick by the invisible work Rick did in aid of the Avengers. Compartmentalized, yeah, he got it. So initially, it had been nothing but gratitude on his part toward Rick. Except for the night he’d really gotten to know Rick, outside of Arnhem—him swamped with memories of the War he hadn’t seen coming, and Rick knocking on the door of the house SHIELD had quartered him for the short anti-terrorism mission.</p><p>He could stay on the Helicarrier, he’d argued with Nick, but Nick’s one eye had given him a look, and Nick had said he probably should get down there and just chill. And Nick had been right. He’d needed it. Strolled out into the cold night air and thought of the young men whom they had all been in 1942, hoping one of them in command was together enough to not get the rest of them killed. Except that sometime right before midnight, thinking of quenching his lamps and going to bed, there had been a knock on his door. First peeking through the drawn curtains, he had outright cracked seeing who he knew it couldn’t be. Then closing his eyes, giving his head a shake, he’d told himself to get past it. After seventy years, to just let it go, no matter that it perpetually felt like that morning. To know, and not just want to <i>believe</i> that it was over. It was past, and by the reckoning of his reset lifecycle, a very long time ago. Always, cutting himself slack because he had gotten to see Peggy and so didn’t see her around every corner. Knowing that it was a lack of closure making him see things each time he turned his head. As now.</p><p>In such a state he had opened the front door to find Bucky standing there.</p><p>Full olive drab winter service uniform, regimental insignia, hot to trot Army haircut, and good-natured smile in place. It had been dark outside—it had been winter in the Netherlands—and his heart had flown to the moon and back in the time it took for him to choke down the cry in his throat. In the same time, his serum-accelerated mind had registered that there was no damned way that this was his Bucky.</p><p>Bucky who had died because he hadn’t moved fast enough.</p><p>It hadn’t mattered. His heart, his head, his knees had popped like butane on wet firewood.</p><p>“Buck,” he had gasped.</p><p>“Yes, Steve,” Rick Jones had said back, his voice as breathless. “That’s exactly right.” Then stepped inside.</p><p>And he had stepped back, speechless, blinking at the sight before him. Because of course it wasn’t Bucky.</p><p>But Rick had reached for him, slipping his arm around his waist. And slowly pulling him close. “You don’t have to say a word, Steve,” Rick had breathed.</p><p>And when he hadn’t moved beyond his initial stumble against Rick, even though Rick shouldn’t have been able to move him independently, no more than a human could suddenly shoulder a boulder out of place by sheer want, Rick, just Bucky’s height too, had smiled right into his eyes. “I know what you want, Steve. What we both want.”</p><p>He hadn’t been able to breathe. He had since never felt anything like it outside of Dr. Erskine’s super soldier serum before the metal tomb had transformed his life. Still, when Rick had lowered his head to his ear, kissed him there and whispered, “Your Buck’s here now, Steve, we’re all right,” he had stepped back.</p><p>In an action he seemed to have woken up knowing how to perform, he dropped his head and retracted his left arm, and when he shot it forward again, Rick was skyward. Hurtling up into the cold black air toward the winking star that was the cloaked, hovering Helicarrier. Without independent flight capabilities—he meant both of them—he’d as instinctively taken off in a mad run toward the open fields ahead of Rick. At the first set of buildings, bounding at them, left then right, up and hard. Into the sky he’d projected, friction bearing down on him like a viscous skin scrub, until he began dropping. By then he had him in sights. . . then in his arms. . . catching him as Rick too fell. . . and descending them both to Earth.</p><p>He landed them more jarringly than he would have a civilian. Rick nonetheless had been rattled, badly. Trembling like a leaf in an unrelenting wind. </p><p>He’d made no eye contact with Rick. “I need you to get out of here and I never want to see you within ten feet of me again.”</p><p>Turning without a word, Rick had taken off into the darkness.</p><p>Had Rick been some kind of SHIELD setup? He’d teased the notion to Nick, long before their Hydra problems. Talking around the subject and never actually mentioning Rick. Instead, touching on whatever scenarios SHIELD might have had going on him. It wasn’t how his mind worked naturally, which was why when his own next door neighbor had in fact been such a setup, it hadn’t dinged him. But this one had come in too hot. Literally.</p><p>No, Nick had indicated, giving no sense whatsoever that Rick had been anything but Rick Jones out of his goddamned mind. And while he knew that Nick Fury was impenetrable, but on this issue, God help Nick, he would have known. But <i>Nick</i> hadn’t known.</p><p>So troubling had been the shock and wrongness of it, that it hadn’t, also, dinged him for months that there should have been no way at all that a normal person could have survived intact, the punch he had given Rick. He wasn’t proud of his actions over it, but thinking back, he must have been instinctively reacting to a strength in the arm that had pulled him in and the body pressed against him that he still didn’t understand.</p><p>Passing Natasha’s cursory scrutiny, he had flagged Rick for Maria’s attention. Who was he, he had asked her, entire command centers away from Fury. Across ops, Maria had sent Rick one of those spy chief looks he was coming to seriously dislike, only to say that Rick had “done some work with Dr. Banner.”</p><p>Thereby explaining nothing.</p><p>In the days since, with Rick onboard, he’d merely been left wishing he’d given Rick a stern talking to and not just a punch. Then that too had passed, with something else apparently triggered. Him waking nights gasping for entirely different reasons, panting because Bucky suddenly was standing there. . .  Standing there and he couldn’t touch him. Reaching for him and instead watching Bucks fall. . . fall. . . into that bottomless abyss of ice, seeing Bucky’s stunned and horrified expression and knowing he had failed him. Knowing he had donned a mask, a shield and a uniform. . . for no reason whatsoever. </p><p>Then Bucky not falling but standing there, his best buddy a ghost when he reached for him, not moving, his hand passing through him and sending up swirls of grey smoke while Bucky stared still blue eyes at him.</p><p>He honestly couldn’t ever remember crying. Not when his ma died, even though he had stood at her grave-site and suddenly felt the love his ma and pa had had for each other like a weather front coming in. He had felt all of it but he hadn’t cried. Not when he’d seen others do it and thought only that it must leave a terrible headache.</p><p>But his dreams of Bucky broke him and made him cry. Short, horrible, gasping attempts at it anyway. Crying, it seemed, like everything else, required practice.</p><p>Yet to him, it all still felt very stilted. It seemed there should have been so many other ways by now that he could say he was sorry. Ways that meant something to voice for all the young men who’d made it back and hadn’t been able to say they were sorry. To say at the grave-sites of their <i>buddies</i> that they wished it had been them and not <i>them</i> lying dead in those mud fields. Awoken from a seventy-year sleep into a future that was not just America but a world of gods from other realms and mathematics at which Howard Stark would have been speechless. A world in which there were so many ways to express so many things, yet still not a word for your buddy. Or for I’m sorry. Not even better ways to mourn.</p><p>If he couldn’t see Bucky even on a hospice bed to cry over, he'd then reasoned, if in this realm of existence there were no forms of closure for it, then maybe there were other realms in which it was more easily done.</p><p>But Thor had only clamped his shoulder and slowly shaken his head, saying, “Only in Midgard will you find the peace you seek.”</p><p>So no peace at all. But at least, after, he’d had no more dreams of Bucky. Not of the pained kind anyway.</p><p>Anyway, dreams, they said, were just mixed up, crushed up balls of random thoughts. Meaning precisely nothing.</p><p>“Bucky was your man,” Sam went on, tipsily, facilely. “He was the one you wrote letters to even when you weren’t writing letters. And listen, you weren’t writing no damn letters to your local councilor, you were writing <i>reports.</i> Don’t interrupt me, Steve Rogers, I read those so-called letters.”</p><p>Ignoring Rick’s hard gaze from across the canteen, he smiled at Sam. “You did,” he encouraged. </p><p>“Yeah, yeah. Every last one of ‘em. Reports, Steve.” Frowning, Sam stuck up a finger, lowering it with each proclamation. “Unit morale here, unit morale there. More unit morale!”</p><p>“You know we weren’t allowed to say much more than that in those letters. Certainly not what we were up to.”</p><p>“I know that. But I <i>also</i> read the letters of the rest of the Howling Commandos. Including, wait for it, the letters of James Buchanan Barnes.”</p><p>He turned from not looking at Rick to looking at Sam.</p><p>“Now, now,” Sam said, oblivious to his stunned expression. He’d been to the Smithsonian countless times. It had never occurred to him that Bucky had written letters. Much less that they were available for reading.</p><p>“Now I know your commando unit was superfucking classified. Pre-special forces, and <i>we</i> special forces have <i>you</i> guys to thank for that.” Sam stopped, letting out a soft, long burp before saying, “Have we thanked you guys for that?”</p><p>“No idea. Haven’t been to any ceremonies. But you were saying you read Bucky’s letters.”</p><p>Sam nodded. “Yeah, yeah, so. . .” then faded out, then straightened in his chair. “Fuck man, I need some water.”</p><p>Having waited for the inevitable all night, he pushed the two bottles of iced water at his elbow toward Sam. Who stared at them. “Thanks,” Sam said.</p><p>After the first bottle was consumed, he said casually, “You said you read Bucky’s letters.”</p><p>Sam wiped the alcohol induced sweat off his forehead, neatly tossing the empty water bottle toward the nearest trashcan. While he locked his jaw, wishing Natasha were present to swiftly extract the information he was tight all over to receive.</p><p>“Fuck was I talking about?” Sam said.</p><p>He licked his dry lips and said, “You were talking about Buck’s letters during the war.”</p><p>“Right,” Sam said emphatically. “Right. All right, so. . .” and blinking hard, brightly, Sam did his best to retrace his thoughts. While that was happening, he himself reached forward, and when he sat back, was sipping the now-cooling vodka he’d grabbed. He needed it. “So—” Sam said, “While you were writing your sanitized letters to your local councilors, Buchanan <i>also. . . </i> didn’t have anyone to write to. Mind blown yet? Okay, so wait for it. So y’all were— I mean, it was US military policy to encourage y’all to write home, right?” And at his nod, “Okay, so at the start of the war, Buchanan was writing a string of letters to— what’d y’all call them back then?”</p><p>“Dames,” he said fondly, unable to help his smile, associated with so many poor but unforgettable memories. “Or broads, if that was your style.”</p><p>Sam laughed, throatily. Drawing back to them the sharp eyes of Richard Jones from across the canteen, which was full of his fellow former SHIELD agents, all of them talking rowdily. Except for Rick.</p><p>“Right, so at the start of the war, Buchanan— hold up. Did you call him James? Or just Bucky? Did everyone call him Bucky?”</p><p>“You need to get on with it,” he told him quietly, warningly. </p><p>“Okay, okay. So Buchanan was writing letters home at the beginning of the war, and it was to whichever <i>dame</i> of the moment. But a year or so in, his letters change. All now addressed to this one chick. Rebecca. Everything. And I mean all of it. You know, like, heart bleeding stuff.” As if suddenly aware of the subject matter, Sam took a slow, hard breath. Slowly shaking his head at the tabletop. “Heart bleeding stuff. I don’t have to tell you. You know?”</p><p>Thankfully, Sam wasn’t looking at him. He had no idea what expression he had on his face. The world seemed to have stopped. The sounds of the canteen muted. “What?” he asked.</p><p>Sam looked up at him and didn’t seem to know quite what. “What do you mean what?” Sam asked.</p><p>“Did you— You said Rebecca,” he said calmly.</p><p>“Yeah. Just about all of Buchanan’s letters post-1942 were addressed to a Rebecca. I assumed that was his girl, and it’s kinda sad he didn’t get to come home to her. Partly why I said, heart bleeding stuff.”</p><p>“Rebecca wasn’t Bucky’s girl. She was his sister.”</p><p>“Oh,” Sam said, after a moment, blinking. </p><p>“And she died even before I met him.”</p><p>Going very still, Sam sat back with a hard sigh. As sober now as was possible, Sam stared at him, then slowly shook his head in apology. “I’m sorry, Steve. I didn’t mean to trivialize any of it.”</p><p>“You did nothing wrong,” he said quickly, somehow speaking when it felt that his voice was gone, somewhere else. “But if Bucks was writing Rebecca the entire time, then why’d you think it was all about me?” And at Sam’s full pause, “Isn’t that what you were getting at?”</p><p>Lips clamped, Sam nodded.</p><p>“So why’d you think that?” he asked, a little aggressively.</p><p>Sam shrugged a shoulder, slowly, beginning to look uncomfortable. “I dunno. Maybe because he mentioned you in every one.”</p><p>“Everyone did that. I was the dancing the monkey, Captain America.”</p><p>Sam was shaking his head, side to side. “Those words never came up.”</p><p>“What, dancing monkey?”</p><p>“No, Captain America. Not even after you liberated his regiment. He never mentioned Captain America, he only ever talked of Steve, Steve, Steve. The Institute, the Smithsonian, they think of the letters only in the context of Cap, the Howling Commandos, all the rest. Makes sense, seeing as he was one of the Commandos. And honestly, I think they’re also probably trying to figure out whether the letters were code he was writing home to Rebecca. Whom they thought, like the rest of us, was his girl. You know, like code about your missions. But it wasn’t no code, man,” Sam said, shaking his head. “He was missing his guy.”</p><p>Nearly doubled over with a sudden pain in his chest, he managed to sit forward, crossing his arms on the table.</p><p>“I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to bring things up.”</p><p>He nodded, and after a while, took a breath. “So what’d the letters say? About . . . Steve?”</p><p>“Well, you know, embarrassingly emotional stuff. He’s our leader, we’d get nothing done if not for him, he’s got the heart of a lion.”</p><p>“That <i>is</i> embarrassing.”</p><p>“The men love him,” Sam continued, reciting, summarizing. “He comes by and talks to us and we all sleep better at night. <i>I</i> sleep better at night.”</p><p>He was still sitting forward at the table, frowning at it. “That’s all really hard to believe, to be honest. None of that was Bucky’s style. He didn’t even talk like that to dames.”</p><p>Sam shrugged. While he reached for the alcohol that could do nothing for him.</p><p>“What was it like between the two of you during the war?” Sam asked softly. “Because reading his letters, it felt . . . like a ton of unrequited.”</p><p>He shook his head, feeling confused. “I don’t think so, Sam. Honestly—? I would have been flattered and honored to have that kind of attention from Bucky. And . . . I’m not even into that.”</p><p>“I get,” Sam said softly.</p><p>He could see Bucky on the flight deck of the Jump Jet, before they descended to see whether Helmut Zemo had perfected his plan and unleashed a personal hell on them. The total faith in Bucky’s eyes that they would die there together stopping whatever needed to be stopped. Then on the infirmary bed on the Quinjet, Bucks not looking at him when he had kissed him. Never having done anything like it but thinking nothing of it. Wanting only to hold him. Scared Bucky didn’t believed him when he said everything would be okay.</p><p>“I just wish more than anything that—” he stopped and took a breath, suddenly realizing that in this, the twenty-<i>first</i> century, there were in fact words for the things he wished to say. He glanced at Sam. “That we could be together again. I know how that sounds after what I just said. But it’s how I feel. I want him back here, without all. . . <i>this</i> between us. Shield, Hydra. It’s so unfair. Bucky was my whole world, and we were just two kids from Brooklyn. If— ” he stopped, breathed. Thinking about Peggy. Gone forever. “But that was everyone in the War. All our losses. And I guess I ought to be grateful for the miracle that’s our lives right now. Including that I got him back at all.”</p><p>“Right,” Sam said gently, nodding. “And look. . . them African <i>dames</i> will take real good care of him.”</p><p>He fell back, sitting back and laughing breathlessly. “They’d better. Or they’ll have me to answer to.”</p><p>“How much longer, did they say?” Sam asked, signaling for another round of vodkas, which he immediately signaled off and tossed Sam the spare water bottle.</p><p>“No idea. Depends on how long Shuri takes. Could be tomorrow, could be ten years from now.”</p><p>“It won’t be ten years from now.”</p><p>“How’d you know?”</p><p>“Cause I know stuff about <i>dames.</i>”</p><p>He started laughing.</p><p>“No, I do,” Sam said, laughing as hard, but keeping it together enough to continue. “Especially of the unrequited kind. And I can tell you, they can’t ever <i>wait</i> to wake up and light up your ass.” They were both crying with laughter at this point. “So,” Sam gasped, “if those Africans sort him out even a little bit, he’ll wake <i>himself</i> up, <i>bright</i> an’ early, just so he can come get some <i>answers</i> about them damn letters. Talkin’ ‘bout, I loved you from afar.”</p><p>“Bucky loved me up close,” he heard himself saying, before he could stop.</p><p>‘Well, there you go.”</p><p>Smiling, wiping at his eyes, he stifled a smile. “God willing, anyway,” he said.</p><p>“Amen, brother. He’ll be all right.” Sam looked toward at the bar, and said, “<i>Now</i> can I get more vodka?”</p><p>“<i>Quiet</i> yourself down, soldier.”</p><p>Sam gave him a surprised look, then broke into laughter, pointing a finger at him. “You just swore at me. I know it by now.”</p><p>He put up both fists, hunched his shoulders in a fighting stance. “All right,” Sam said, waving him away. And settling back against his seat, he pushed the useless vodka away and took up sipping one of the fresh bottles of water that had been deposited for them.</p><p>When things settled down inside him again, one thing remained afloat. He missed Bucky something fierce. And there was only so much listening to recordings of their old meetings he could do. Especially because Bucky hardly ever spoke up. <i>I’ll come back for you, Bucks,</i> he thought, already composing his message for the morning.</p><p>At this point, those unheard, unanswered messages were among the few things keeping him going. All the things he couldn’t say, carried subliminally on electrical and radio waves. Compounded tomorrow by unasked questions about . . . letters. Now he found himself wondering whether the Smithsonian had an online archive of the Captain American <i>permanent exhibition.</i> But what would that get him, anyway. That Bucks had considered him a good leader during the War? One literally worth writing home about?</p><p>Sometimes he wondered whether he should have taken him anywhere at all. Whether it wouldn’t have been better for the two of them to just remain on the Quinjet and go wherever life took them. Just struggle it out together. With Shield and Hydra gone, Peggy gone, what truly remained? But he knew it was just his own need talking. Bucky had given him enough blank looks while still on the Quinjet alone to have ripped his heart to pieces many times over. Bucky needed help. It wasn’t about what <i>he</i> needed. His job was to find whatever way to cope. It was, as he had told Sam, miracle enough just to have each other again.</p><p>Across the canteen, Richard Jones stood up at his table, and smiled at him. Rick had red hair, which he’d apparently either dyed or worn a wig to play his truly disturbed Bucky role. Gaze flicking at him, Rick followed his co-former SHIELD agents toward the tray deposit areas. And dumping his tray and cutlery, gave him one last lingering look before leaving with his colleagues.</p><p>And he sat there watching Sam begin his journey toward sobering up, saying nothing at all.</p><p>“That arm, though,” Sam said.</p><p>And he started laughing. And thinking, <i>Yeah,</i> with a smile. <i>Everything. Not just the arm.</i></p><p>
  <i>Call ya in the morning, Buck.</i>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. STRANDED</h2></a>
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            <p>How do you say goodbye to the one you love?</p><p>Bucky is healing.. and it includes reliving a very special memory. [Flashback to when Steve brought Bucky to Wakanda.]</p>
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</p><p>“Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone,” he’d said to Steve, the cryogenic chamber whirring to life behind them, accelerating his heart like the promise of a trigger at whose end he didn’t know what lay.</p><p>“How can I?” Steve said, looking past his shoulder at the thing, then after a while, bringing his gaze poignantly back to him. “You’re taking all the stupid in the world with you.” Said so sadly that he’d felt an enormous blank where there should have been emotions.</p><p>Neither of them said anything after that. They were standing very close, as close as they got these days outside of a mission. Shuri and the lab staff were swarming, no words to spare for them when there was crucial last minute preparation to be done. “Days ago, we expected you two, Captain,” she said pertly. “Sergeant Barnes. <i>Days,</i> for a procedure that’s <i>never</i> been attempted. I had to psyche myself up, only to wait and wait, and then wait some more. So now . . . I need to <i>focus.</i> And if you don’t mind—” this part especially pertly— “stand over <i>there.</i>”</p><p>T’Challa had already left, telling him goodbye and good luck.</p><p>“Goodbye, Sergeant Barnes,” said as though hoping for the best for his sake, but maybe also suspecting what might actually be best for the world at large. “I wish you the greatest of luck.” He’d nodded his thanks, made no eye contact. Hadn’t waited for the “Hope to see you up and about soon” he knew would never come. He had not killed T’Challa’s father, but it took effort to remember that. Both for him and for T’Challa. Because only random chance had voided that fact.</p><p>“What’s it like in there?” Steve asked softly. “When . . . they . . . put you under.”</p><p>“You mean when I’m in stasis?” he slowly asked, and Steve nodded. <i>I dream of the past.</i></p><p>
  <i>I dream of us.</i>
</p><p><i>“That is not possible!”</i> came the voice of Arnim Zola, immediately scrawling across his thoughts. <i>“He cannot dream. He cannot think. He cannot be, expect as awakened to be. You don’t have to worry about things like that! The Winter Solider is not a beta program, to be tested out there in the world . . . He is art!”</i></p><p>At Steve, he slowly shrugged, shook his head.</p><p>It wasn’t for almost a year after he was awakened that it occurred to him just how personally Steve must have taken that stasis chamber—when Steve’s own had yielded such different results.</p><p>“Buck,” Steve said, eyes on him like a parent on the first day of school. Had he been in a different mood, he would have laughed. A <i>lighter</i> mood, would have been the way to put it. But that would have meant that the mood was heavy to begin with. For him, it felt neither one nor the other. He was resigned to whatever awaited him in there—a hundred years of active life wasn’t bad at all for anyone—but he didn’t think Steve had yet learned the word. Not even after their fun, actually really enjoyable, stolen days and nights in Wakanda. An unscheduled delay and the cause of Shuri’s lament. Not even after it all accumulated in last night. Not even then was Steve submissive toward the inevitability of the chamber he needed to return to. Still holding onto some form and system of belief he wasn’t privy to.</p><p>“You remember the time I decided I’d join the school swim team?” Steve asked, and then he did laugh, remembering. Exactly how he had survived Steven Rogers was a true Brooklyn mystery. “Remember how you paced the shore, cuz of course I had to do it in the ocean with real water an’ everything?”</p><p>“Yeah, not in the pool like everyone else cuz the water in there wasn’t real, I guess.”</p><p>“Right,” Steve said, curbing a smile. Both hands still on him. Steve’s left one sending the sweetest vibrations through his living arm, the other throughout his ribcage where it was clamped. Both effecting the same thing—little, continual electric shocks to his heart. So he hadn’t been imagining it throughout their time there. He smiled inside at him finding electric shocks sweet, no matter how small.</p><p>Since their encounter on the Quinjet, he’d begun remembering more and more . . . a time when moments like these were . . . things he might have craved. Memories existing in which the thoughts occupied him. Had him writing about them even. He even saw himself doing it. But past the memories themselves, he couldn’t imagine what could have felt so urgent at the time. Caused him such drive. Was there a trigger for that kind of response too, which he didn’t know and might have been removed from him. Consequently, leaving the memories along with the rest of the world, dull. Colorless. Awaiting a spark.</p><p>But now Steve’s hands . . .  seemed to actually have that spark. Were he not about to undergo a life altering procedure, he would have been held captive by the sensations. Like the lightest of memory wipes, leaving no sense of his insides being scrambled. No anguish from a sudden tangle of emotions seeming to resolve only to the wrong connections. Just . . . a sweet, air-light, trickle. A version of their past days together, manifested as touch. </p><p>Months later, Shuri would dramatically wave her hands, act like she was dying from his slowness of uptake, pillorying him as to <i>why</i> he hadn’t told her this little piece of information and <i>of course</i> he was going to wake from stasis with a nasty hangover-aversion to touch, meanwhile there <i>she</i> was thinking she had done something wrong. <i>“Hello, hello, hellllooooo . . . Why doesn’t anybody tell me these things befoooooore . . .”</i></p><p>You’re saying you could have prevented it, he would ask. To which she smiled, dipped him a look, and said deeply, <i>“Nobody could have stopped that from happening to you, Bucky.”</i> Oh, thanks, he would say, filling up with . . . pleasure, he realized it was. A feeling as if taste had been restored to his tongue, and she had laughed.</p><p>However, as on the Quinjet, Steve seemed unaware of anything that might be happening outside of their imminent separation. None at all. He’d thought initially that Steve’s hold on him was for his reassurance—an anchor to help him face what was coming without fear. But he quickly came to see that it was more that Steve was having a problem letting him go.</p><p>“Remember I was terrified,” Steve said, digging into him a little, perhaps picking up that his attention on the physical grip had superseded whatever they were supposed to be talking about. “Remember?”</p><p>“’Course you weren’t,” he answered slowly.</p><p>“Yeah, I was. Scared outta my mind. Out there on the Cony Island beach, at midnight, waitin’ to get eaten by a shark. Are ya kiddin’?”</p><p>He smiled.</p><p>“But I knew it was the best way to do it. With the tides and currents and all’a that. I knew it, Buck. And I knew I could do it because you were there standing on the shore.” Then after a moment, with a smile, “Guarding ma’ pants.”</p><p>Lowering his head, he’d slowly shaken it. “It’s fine, Steve,” he said, suddenly realizing which one of them was scared. “It’s like you said, I’ll be all right.”</p><p>“I know what I said,” Steve whispered, grip on him tightening.</p><p>It was remarkable, really. Puzzling, as though with each squeeze, producing a trickle, like gently squeezing juice from lime, the world around him was slowly, incrementally, being translated back into color, with sound. He wondered whether it was the combination of his acceptance of his fate, and of Steve’s own distress.</p><p>Alternatively, it might actually just be no more than a featured trick of his deadened brain. A last, humane farewell to the inhuman assassin. </p><p>“I know exactly what I said,” Steve repeated softly there in the present, as if to himself. Then lowered his head as well. And he waited, wondering whether Steve was going to kiss him again like on the Quinjet. Softly, on his cheek, like he was a special dame. As Steve hadn’t all these days when he had been expecting it. When it had seemed inevitable from the looks, time, and attention Steve had showered him. When nothing happened, he raised his eyes to Steve’s. Confident blue ones awaited him. The most confident eyes he had ever looked into.</p><p>Tightening his grip on him even more, he heard Steve say, like reciting a prayer, “I’m you right now on the shore, Buck. Just put yourself in my shoes — you know yourself. You know you’ll always be there. And all I gotta do is swim back to you.” Then even tighter still. Including with a slow, slight, advance around his torso of the other hand. “Wouldn’t you trust that?”</p><p>He nodded. Half distracted, nonetheless, by the things Steve seemed to want them both to feel yet was not addressing, and by the things he himself and T’Challa hoped for—that the world was about to permanently rid itself of the Winter Soldier. He saw the respect T’Challa carried in his eyes for Steve. But he also saw when T’Challa looked past Steve at him. And in T’Challa’s eyes, there was no distress.</p><p>But understanding what Steve wanted from him, he nodded. And in that moment, also fully understood that Steve truly had no idea. Even after last night. </p><p>Understood then that the capacity to see him and think of what he was simply wasn’t in Steve’s nature. There they stood, noses almost touching, with the reality between them that only one of them carried a clean memory of that scene. For the other, it was nothing but a simulation.  A run-through kill scenario.</p><p>For the other, the memory only awaited a trigger—a voice command from Arnim Zola, Alexander Pierce, and even Helmut Zemo. Anyone with a key. That was all his anxious sentry off the waters of Coney Island was now: base code. The predominant purpose of that and nearly all memory residing within the brain of the Winter Soldier.</p><p>When Steve therefore spoke of trust in a memory like that . . . </p><p>Steve then kissed him. Hand now locked on his arm, the other by then almost having made its way around his torso, the kiss to his cheek came all but inevitably. And sank his breath right back into him. Disappeared it like something intentionally tossed into the depths of waters he hadn’t then known existed. Those waters that awaited him, and from whose depths he would eventually find all breath. All resurrected life.</p><p>That was how Steve’s kiss felt that morning, before he stepped into the space that paused time — a chamber that broke the past from the future. As though the past had forever taken his breath, winged on a thought that could only be understood in the future. So he stood immobilized, confounded by the new powers Steve seemed to have developed over him.</p><p>Steve was in all-black that morning—black shirt and undershirt, and the dark BDU cargos of SHIELD agents. At first he’d presumed Steve’s choice in clothing as due to their late night and early morning, time not having permitted for Steve to pretty up. But as Steve clutched him and he could almost feel the heartbeats trying to touch his own, he suspected that Steve had worn the uncharacteristically dark clothing from an unconscious sense of mourning.</p><p>Sighing after delivering his kiss, yet refusing any air between them, Steve didn’t pull back. Only set his forehead to his temple. It was somehow an even more intimate posture than on the Quinjet, where Steve had touched foreheads. Now as Steve spoke, Steve’s breath was on his face. On his mouth. “Swim back to me, Buck.”</p><p>Then, when he didn’t respond, a silent sigh. “I’ll see you soon, Bucky.”</p><p>He didn’t know.</p><p>When his dreams began months later, he would dream often of that moment, even more than the one on the Quinjet. Dreams which, in the lanes of the ones to follow, would prove quite tame. But which nonetheless marked the beginning of a wild and terrible longing—a screaming, denied need wrapped tight for fifty years, that would see him cracked and blown to dust in the winds across Wakanda long before a creature of the cosmos actually made it happen.</p><p>Affliction born in that moment, because he’d been a man immobilized not by his own shadow — what harm could a shadow do — but by his actual self. Had he not been, he would have turned his head toward Steve’s mouth. On the Quinjet, and right there in Shuri’s lab. He would have done it. Turned and gotten himself a taste of what it felt like. Hard or soft. Hot or even hotter. Spared himself months of clutching and squeezing at his bed-cloths, at himself, while gasping in a Waters-cleansed, heightened mind that experienced itself in bright lights; drowning him in sensations of what it would be like taking that particular train all the way to its terminus.</p><p>Would it have helped, made a difference when he dreamt of his arm up against a wall, a body pushing against him, kisses falling where he had fallen and been broken. Would having tasted even a little have calmed the voice whispering such incredible things, things surely coming from him because he had never heard them elsewhere, much less from Steve. A small taste to spare him violent, desperate tossing while he pleaded with sanity to deliver him from a bottomless want that seemed to know its place only in waking life.</p><p>To Steve’s words, <i>I’ll see you soon, Bucky,</i> he only nodded. Then at last stepping back, Steve slowly released him, with a flicked look at Shuri as though daring her to mess up. She had ignored Steve, looking nervous but determined enough for all of them.</p><p>So much so that even after she had successfully wiped him, she kept him in stasis for nearly another month. In a kind of reboot into safe-mode. There, she triggered him hard, and repeatedly, and without the need for the Winter Soldier manual. Because, she explained to him, showing him on his awakening, all the previously used trigger words that had remained like residue from a sieve. Rendered right there on her screen in words. For the abstract ones, in rudimentary images, as his brain had stored them. “You see this, Sergeant Barnes. You see what they did to you.”</p><p>He hadn’t wanted to see. His newly refurbished rational mind, at near mint condition, had told him he should have not only wanted to see but also be very impressed by her tech. By her explanations for how she had done it, how she had blocked language processing clusters until his neurons had forcefully formed new, disassociated ones. But he had not wanted to see, not to hear.</p><p>That morning, as Steve moved away, he had avoided any more eye contact with Steve until it was time. Only looking down at the soft black cloth Steve had carefully dressed his missing arm with that morning. Only waiting for Shuri and her team to put him back in stasis. Waiting to close his eyes and hope for a dreamless sleep.</p><p>—</p><p>“Kettle. . . seven. . . Gorgon. . .” the voice said, shuddering him involuntarily against his restraints. “Light. . . simile. . . comparison . . .”</p><p>His mind was rattling and his body screaming, but his self was placid. Therefore so was his body. Completely still. He felt the clashing tensions, the vibrations in his head, yet in form was completely still.</p><p>For the first time in fifty years, separated from the assassin . . . </p><p>There were triggers being spoken into his mind, but he was having to try to understand the words. And he couldn’t. Elusive, as in a language he couldn’t understand, even though he knew these words, knew this language. Rifling through the many embedded in his brain but finding no base forms, no syntax to apply . . . </p><p>He was chasing, and unable to seize, the Winter Soldier. A racing, pitch-black form moving parallel to him . . . </p><p>And he was suffering, because now was the time when he should be set free. Triggered, he should have been Tirade—woken from stasis, freed from his straps and let loose on the world. A line of code for a mission: Complete and return to home base. And after completion, euphoria, peace that would allow him to sleep untroubled. Partially untroubled.</p><p>Instead nothing was right. The Soldier was not him.</p><p>“Precipitation . . . vector . . . Xenon . . .”</p><p>He was screaming wildly against the pain, shuddering to set himself free, yet unmoving. Tearing against himself, yet completely still, silent.</p><p><i>Steve!</i> he screamed. <i>Steve . . . help me! You promised . . . you promised . . . you promised—!</i></p><p>“Highland . . . brittle . . . jester . . .”</p><p><i>You promised,</i> he wailed. <i>Steve, you promised . . . Help me . . .  please . . . help me . . . </i></p><p>But he was perfectly still.</p><p>—</p><p>Completely still, he was staring down at the sight of the Wakandan capital city in a state of silent marvel. New York City, this wasn’t.</p><p>Within minutes of their arrival on the Quinjet, he and Steve braced inside the cockpit, watching in a wonder the pilot could not understand as they penetrated the Dome, T’Challa gave them an audience. In this office overlooking downtown Birnin Zana. The sight was astounding. Fifty million people and you wouldn’t know. He was looking through the remarkably transparent glass walls while Steve and T’Challa were talking. Both having very quickly gotten the very correct impression that he was long since resigned to being a lab experiment and they didn’t need him in their discussion. The idea was to rid the world of the Winter Soldier. What would he know of that. Objectively, he was their prisoner. And anything they wanted or felt was necessary, he wasn’t in a position to argue. Seventy years and counting.</p><p>First the teenage girl had been there, talking about the reprogramming of synapses and the intact retention of memories and things like that. Things Steve probably understood as much as he did, but over which Steve presided and queried like a mission to be led in the morning. Being after they’d both gotten over the startling fact that modern times included things like kid genius and the like.</p><p>“Why didn’t the programming just wipe Bucky’s mind completely?” came the question from Steve’s arsenal. “Why does he still have all his memories, including . . . all the stuff he did?”</p><p>“The programming couldn’t,” the teenage girl said. “No one is actually a blank slate, Captain Rojaz. Otherwise we would have no neurons whatsoever in our brains. What the program did instead was to <i>incorporate</i> Sergeant Barnes’s memories into a very efficient framework. Each mission making him better for the next. His pre-program memories happen to be very painful, intensely infused with a powerful sense of loss—”</p><p>“Yeah, we were in a world war—”</p><p>“Yes, and it was used to create an extremely effective assassin. One always perfectly in balance, never out of control.”</p><p>“I don’t know what that means. I don’t understand.”</p><p>“It means that Sergeant Barnes has all his memories intact. He is fully in there. But his memories are all without context. Every one, from his very earliest, now exists only in the context and for the use of the Winter Soldier. It is a masterful program, truly,” she said, sighing in a manner beyond her years. “Too masterful, because in applying memory retention, it makes my job that much harder. <i>Very</i> that much harder.”</p><p>“Are you sure you’re not just saying that so that when it’s accomplished everyone will say how amazing you are,” T’Challa asked.</p><p>“Possibly,” she answered, curbing a big giggle.</p><p>At the glass walls, he smiled inside, feeling Steve’s bristly look at her even from where he sat. Steve who had always been so serious.</p><p>“But you can do this,” Steve asked.</p><p>“Yes, Captain Rojaz, I can.”</p><p>“And— after? What— what’ll it be like for Bucky?”</p><p>“I don’t know what it will be like for Sergeant Barnes personally. But I can assure you that a fully functional human being will wake from this procedure.”</p><p>“And how long,” Steve asked immediately. “How long do you think it’ll take?”</p><p>“I can’t say. It depends on how Sergeant Barnes’s brain responds. The human brain is a living thing, even though people insist on comparing it to a computer. Many . . . strange things happen in its repair. Especially in self-repair.”</p><p>“Self-repair? Strange things? I thought you just said—”</p><p>“Sergeant Barnes will be okay. His brain will be okay. But— he— well, <i>he</i> will need to want to come <i>back.</i>”</p><p>There was silence.</p><p>After Shuri left, Steve still didn’t let T’Challa go. Remaining by the door and continuing intently in low tones. <i>“What are the arrangement for his arm care while he’s under? That’s gotta be nightly. And I don’t know how it’s done here— I don’t want to tell anyone how to to their job, but— just because he’s under doesn’t mean he’s not aware. So besides his physical care, someone should be responsible to talk to him daily. We’re from Brooklyn, New York and— there’s also the war— So as you can see, there’s a lot to talk about. And I could drop some articles and books if anyone needs any.” “It’s all been taken care of, Captain Rogers. You really have nothing to worry about.”</i></p><p>Fifty million, he thought, staring down. That was almost seven times all of New York City, and the world thought New York was massive — “And <i>hella</i> crowded,” to hear his Ma complain irritably, and his Dad nod in agreement. “Thank <i>Gad</i> for Prospect Park!” </p><p>Yet all he saw when he looked down there was greenery—space like all of Prospect <i>and</i> Manhattan’s Central Park <i>were</i> The City, as he would come to think of downtown in the months to come. Glittering skyscrapers hugged up by trees and landscaped shrubbery, and animals on a stroll. Yeah, he was definitely seeing that — giraffes, antelopes with long striped horns, wild dogs with ears big enough and stuck up enough to be at home on rabbits. And even fat little rhinos drinking from ponds next to their mothers. Animals wandering about contentedly looking for humans to say hello to.</p><p>Digging deeply enough, he could almost remember what it must have felt like to take delight in things like animals being able to cohabit with humans. </p><p>But he would have to go very deep. And it would be only the memory and not the thing itself. Which made some part of him sad. </p><p>But who could really feel sadness in the absence of feeling. And who could feel at all for nothing but an echo.</p><p>After the meeting in T’Challa’s office, they’d been taken on a tour of Shuri’s lab. Where she’d officiously called him Sergeant Barnes enough times to make even Steve smile to himself.</p><p>“Remind you of someone?” Steve asked as they emerged from the lab.</p><p>Turning, he’d smiled at Steve, not needing a reminder of what Steve had been like in ancient times. When Steve would always snap-to even before knowing what the hell there was to snap to. Even if it was just rubbing sleep from their eyes enough for a Saturday morning game of kick-the-can on the neighborhood street. Scrawny little kid ordering everyone about. And somehow, everyone obeying.</p><p>“She’ll take good care’a ya,” Steve said.</p><p>Silently, he’d nodded.</p><p>“You don’t think so?” Steve prodded, and once more he’d nodded.</p><p>“Yeah,” Steve said. “Looks like it.”</p><p>Then, shown his royal apartments—and he did mean royal; a couple hundred floors skyward, draped in rich comfort and flooded with sunlight. Returning later, he’d stood at the entrance to the parlor, at his bedroom, trying for Steve’s sake to look present and conscious of the importance of what they were doing. To appear cognizant of whom everyone kept calling Sergeant Barnes. And why it seemed so important to save him.</p><p>He did think often of Bucky—Steve’s Bucky, as he though of him—but only as pieced together memories. Like pulling books from a library shelf. <i>He</i> was Bucky, he reminded himself each morning on waking. Wandering out to sit on a colorful, silent world off his bedroom balcony. Bucky was to whom all these memories that made him smile belonged. Bucky was why they were there. He didn’t really even have to understand. Only had to believe in the one waiting for him in the living room.</p><p>That first morning, after the lab tour, blinking, it was to break a string of thought. To find Steve with hands shoved deep into his cargos, gently scuffing at the thick threads of the carpet with the big toe of his sneakers. And him realizing that he probably either hadn’t given the right answer, or more likely, had lost time.</p><p>“You all right there, Buck,” Steve asked, not looking at him.</p><p>Steve flicked him a look, and lost in a space empty of instruction and trying to fill itself, he knew he still shouldn’t have been thinking of zeroed scopes. And patterns in which blood sprayed.</p><p>“I should get to bed,” he’d said to Steve that first evening, following an official tour of Birnin Zana, after the nursing staff had left. “Early morning.”</p><p>“No sweat,” Steve said, very softly. “You need any help with that?” indicating his missing left arm, which, from the Quinjet, was wrapped in plain white bandage, showing under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He shook his head. The staff had shown him where supplies were.</p><p>“Where’d they put you,” he thought to ask.</p><p>“Nah, I’m back on the jet.”</p><p>He nodded. “Night, Steve.”</p><p>“G’night, Bucky.”</p><p>The following morning, he’d woken, showered and gotten ready first thing for their return to the lab. Ready to get strapped in and hopefully, blissfully, put under. For the occasion, he’d selected a cobalt blue cloth from the bamboo boxes left him, with which to sling his missing arm. Gingerly hooking the kinda cute, oversized knot over his head, he’d let the cloth shrink comfortably against his shoulder, hugging his residual limb like the softest of baby touches, and he found himself smiling down at it. Then he went towards the bedroom door.</p><p>On opening it, he found Steve, in an old white 107th tee and dark grey combat khakis, standing in the midst of a big-fuck breakfast. Spread everywhere, and big enough to serve their entire regiment.With a smile, Steve swept a hand toward the setup. “Care to join me for some breakfast?”</p><p>“Jesus,” he said softly.</p><p>“Right?”</p><p>The Wakandans had laid it out, offering everything they could have imagined for the perfect breakfast—still sizzling hunks of bacon, buttery scrambled eggs, big panfried sausages, hot browned hashed potatoes, steaming fresh baked bread, and a thick sweet bean and plant-root pudding, and juices he’d never tasted.</p><p>Both seated at the breakfast table, Steve had reached out almost helplessly and touched his sling, as if wanting to feel that it, and everything else beneath it, was actually there.</p><p>“Marble,” Steve said, stupidly. “Like yer eyes.”</p><p>He’d smiled, shaking his head.</p><p>“I just said that, didn’t I?”</p><p>And he laughed, nodding, while Steve took his turn to shake his head.</p><p>So they settled in and began chowing down on everything in sight, while he couldn’t help but wonder whether the bounty could be an equivalent last meal. It didn’t matter, didn’t put so much as a blip in his soldier’s appetite, seeing chow and programmed to go. And he listened, nodding, smiling, laughing even at times as Steve regaled him with stories—of waking in their own City in 2011, Nick Fury having put together some hokey thing to keep him thinking it was still war era.</p><p>“Like you’re gonna wake up and . . . not know the country’s not at war.” Steve shook his head. “I guess you gotta not have lived it to think it was about baseball scores and radio.”</p><p>Nodding, he scooped some more of the sweet bean pudding into his bowl. “Here,” Steve said, pushing him more of the fragrant, chewy, fresh bread. “Try it with somma dat.”</p><p>Nodding, he took it.</p><p>“Anyway, so there’s Nick on me, like . . . I’m too slow to adjust. You know? That was easily the hardest part in terms of nonoperational matters, to be honest. All that hovering. Yeah, it’s a shockin’— <i>shock</i> wakin’ up seventy years into the future. I mean, that’s a helluva shock. Though— let’s be honest— people are still people. I don’t gotta tell ya. Still making the same ol’ mistakes. You know?”</p><p>Nodding, he ate.</p><p>“So there’s Nick, and Shield, assuming all manner’a things. Anything they can, really. You needed to check out their charts and stuff. Got the name and all’a that — Captain America. But here’s me, I’m seeing the charts, and I’m seeing Steve Rogers and thinking, noooo thank you. You know how it is, Uncle Sam got you and all that. And I gotta play the part of the dancing money again? No thank you.”</p><p>“What’d you do,” he asked. “When you first woke up. I mean really do?”</p><p>Steven took a long breath. “Looked up Peggy. Led me to the Smithsonian exhibit. Which, if you haven’t seen, is straight up crazy. And I don’t mean a little.” Steve flashed him a look. “They got you up in there.”</p><p>“For real?” he said mildly, and Steve nodded.</p><p>“It’s uh . . . I think the word is poignant.” Which got them both looking at each other before breaking into laughter. “Poignant, right?” Steve said, pulling off a silver dish-cover and uncovering more buttery scrambled eggs. “Us, poignant. <i>Well, hello there, Brucklyn.</i>”</p><p>And he laughed even more, recalling a childhood TV personality Steve could imitate perfectly. </p><p>“Anyway,” Steve continued. “I was Captain America, defrosted. And the one thing I <i>did</i> know was that I wasn’t about to become the dancing monkey all over again. Either Nick Fury was serious about whatever modern day threats they were going on about, or they could keep their Stars and Stripes.”</p><p>“Turns out it was real,” he said. Blurted, really. “And the threat was as serious as it got.”</p><p>“What, you mean you?” Steve asked. “Hydra and all’a that?” He nodded. “Yeah, well.” And after a long moment, a heartfelt smile. “Least it was you.”</p><p>He looked at Steve, unable to smile back. It was hard to have the conversation without having to blink back images of— </p><p>Had Steve ever taken the time to look at the holes in skulls he might have caused, for no reason whatsoever he could think of? Or the pulped remains of a human head, wondering whether that had really come as a result of a blow from the heel of his hand, and if so, why hadn’t he thought to ask the person what argument they might have had with each other for that be the result.</p><p>The least, as Steve named it, had never been him.</p><p>“And you,” Steve asked. “Were you . . . conscious of time passing? All the while, I mean.”</p><p>He cast a look at Steve. After a while said, “Yeah.”</p><p>“What was it like?”</p><p>He shouldn’t have had to think about it. But he had never thought about it. He shrugged his right shoulder, drawing Steve’s eye to his movement, before Steve’s eyes shifted to his missing left arm. But he didn’t stop eating, and Steve didn’t press. So he said, “Like a dream.”</p><p>“Yeah?” Steve asked instantly, head tipped, eyes on him. Staring at his plate, he nodded.</p><p>When he blinked again, he looked around without moving an inch. There was no clock in the room, but his bean pudding look slightly congealed from having been untouched for a while. It was how he knew he’d had lost time. He came to with Steve’s hand on his knee, him giving Steve a barely there, sideways glance. And Steve smiling very nicely in return.</p><p>He looked down once more at his breakfast. It would need reheating.</p><p>“We should go to a bar,” Steve suddenly said. “See what this city’s all about.” Nothing came to him. So after a moment he turned and looked at Steve.</p><p>“What about the lab?” he asked.</p><p>“It can wait.”</p><p>Of course it could. But . . . did either of them want that? Did anyone?</p><p>“You okay with that?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he lied.</p><p>“All right,” Steve said, nodding, piling up on scrambled eggs. “I’ll hook it up.”</p><p>Steve, Sam and Natasha, having committed after the mess with Tony Stark to a cause of tracking all the tesseract-powered weapons on the planet, had given themselves quite the mission. The Quinjet, as a consequence, was holding position in the skies above the City, awaiting Steve’s return.</p><p>In the many months after, he would sometimes look up and imagine seeing the missing Quinjet. Feeling memories flowing like flood waters. Of places that even then he struggled to recall. Distant times, cold nights, as though from . . . a children’s storybook of violence. Memories of camping out in open fields, shivering with other young men, and thinking, <i>hoping,</i> that someone among them knew what the hell the lot of them—from Brooklyn to Jacksonville, Florida—were doing out there in the middle of nowhere Europe. An entire continent many of them had barely heard of before the war. Or of the war itself.</p><p>For most in their regiment, that someone had been Steve Rogers.</p><p>A lost time and place for many whose lives would never be regained. For those long months after his awakening he would look up into the onyx night sky and think of the new cause Steve Rogers had assigned for himself. One in which a new set of others would depend on Steve. One that would take up the next two years. And for half that, keep Steve from him.</p><p>No, he corrected. One that would provide an excuse for him to stay away from Steve.</p><p>As reluctant as Steve had been to let him go under, maybe Steve had felt it too—this separation between them that would pass so very strangely.</p><p>Sam and Natasha, it turned out when Steve called, had already departed Birnin Zana for Addis Ababa. “What’s going on, Natasha?” Steve asked, to her explaining that a contact had informed her of “alien-tech” weaponry in the vicinity, and since she and Sam were only hanging out waiting for him to return, they’d though to check it out. Steve, guiltily— “Oh— well, that’s fine. It’s not like there’s Shield anymore and the Avengers have a hierarchy. You guys go do what you need to do.” Steve hadn’t meant it passive aggressively, just stating what he saw as fact. And Natasha knew that. Still, she’d smiled over the connection, and said, “Every team needs its captain, Cap. We didn’t wanna interrupt. We know how important this is to you. We’re here whenever you need us back. It’s . . .” <i>Half an hour,</i> came Sam’s voice, “ . . . half an hour back to Wakanda.”</p><p>“Thanks, Natasha. I’ll be in touch.”</p><p>So that night, from a vibrant culture he would come to know intimately over the next couple of years, a mini crew of young Wakandans came to pick them up for their first official night out in the city.</p><p>“Steven Rojaz!” they called from off the living room balcony. “We have already told everyone at the bar about you, including the stories of your shield! So you had better have your shield with you! Everyone is excepting to see it!”</p><p>Strolling out onto the balcony, Steve, smiling, had thrown up empty hands. “I don’t have it anymore. It was taken from me.”</p><p>“Taken from you?!” came the appalled shrieks, as first Steve, then him, leapt from the balcony into the hovercraft floating in the sky several meters from the apartment balcony. “Hahhhhh!” cried the young hovercraft pilot, handsome as the day was long. “This guy! What a story! Who took the shield from Captain America!”</p><p>Steve was grinning. Sitting back and shaking his head. Then leaning forward, grabbing him as he found somewhere to sit, making sure it was across from him. Steve smiled at him, the dozen or so kids in the raft shifting and making room and saying hello to them.</p><p>And off they went, floating on what seemed like air currents with no propulsion, yet approaching the City center at speed. Zipping around massive jets of water from polished stone fountains almost too far down to properly see. Structures of steel and vibranium reflecting their craft as they passed.</p><p>The City thrummed with forms of light and electricity that even the most daring of huckster salesmen in their day couldn’t have dreamed up to sell the latest gadget, never mind an entire city. Lights, white, red, blue, passed over Steve’s smiling face like signals, drawing his eyes and keeping them there.</p><p>“How ya like this, Buck?” Steve called to him.</p><p>“I l— I lo— I like it,” he called back.</p><p>Steve smiled, nodding, hardly hearing him over the talk and laughter of their young hosts.</p><p>But he kept his eyes on Steve. He liked it very much.</p><p>At their destination, a bar in a crowded clubbing district, the hovercraft, never touching ground, slipped to a smooth stop a comfortable height off the pavement. And their hosts simply abandoned the small craft—he’d later come to know it was nothing more than an automated taxi—launching themselves overboard in singles and pairs. Grinning, Steve stood, swept a hand toward the craft’s edge. “After you, Bucks.”</p><p>Landing on the pavement, Steve coming down beside him, he looked around. The street was multicolored, screaming with life. Ahead of them at the entrance to the bar, they were being frantically waved over by their hosts. Music was already spilling loudly from the bar’s entrance.</p><p>“Leeet’s go,” Steve said, hands in pockets, head down, as if on duty.</p><p>“What’re you gonna do about your shield,” he asked him, teasingly.</p><p>“I’ll wing it.”</p><p>They both laughed. “That’s really too bad,” he said.</p><p>“Why’s that?”</p><p>“I get the feeling it’d be a broad magnet.”</p><p>Steve laughed, deeply, richly, very sweetly. Then very self-consciously said, “In that case, we really shouldn’t have let Tony take your arm.”</p><p>The words took him a long time to catch up on. Months, in fact.</p><p>So there they were at the bar’s entrance, and he waited behind Steve who was getting a full celebrity welcome. Hails of affection and hugs.</p><p>“Ha!” the bouncers cried. “This is you!” Then they were being regaled with video from whatever the Avengers had accomplished in Sokovia, projected in 3D in the palms of the bouncers. Steve was grinning, nodding, casually accepting the fame that even after witnessing in the war, was still hard to associate with his scrappy childhood buddy from Brooklyn.</p><p>“Enter, enter!” the bouncers cried, sweeping Steve onward, only to freeze on seeing him.</p><p>“Not possible!” they cried, astonished fingers stiff and pointed at him. Then, “Come, come. Come, brother, we heard of your journey to healing.” Then tight hugs for him too. Plus a warm hand rubbing on his back he was surprised to turn and find was Steve’s. And then they were finally ushered inside.</p><p>Inside were fancy seating areas for wherever they wished to settle. Bar, sectioned-off areas anywhere on the six floors of the club—at which both he and Steve looked up and simply lost words. On each floor, they were shown, good looking young Wakandans awaited, decorated with glitter and hair and arm ornaments of all colors that flashed off their skin like rays of light from a prism. Taking a single look at the high octane partying, he and Steve, curbing smiles, found somewhere quiet to sit at the far end of the bar on the ground floor.</p><p>Then Steve proceeded to order drinks and stare at him. He had no idea what to make of it, and so kept looking until Steve smiled, and very helplessly, looked away. Waving a hand like the two of them were talking nonsense, even though neither of them had spoken.</p><p>He was feeling differently toward Steve. He knew it. From the Quinjet he had known it. But he had no choice but to be cautious, wondering whether fifty years of freezing and thawing had somehow altered his brain toward his best friend. <i>What</i> was he feeling toward Steve?</p><p> And why exactly did it feel so familiar.</p><p>Steve talked practically all night with the Wakandans who came and sat with them, coming and leaving—“Young an’ drunk,” Steve said, making him smile—and with him, continually drawing him into conversation. As if by doing so, they could fight off the coming dawn and what came with it, even as they were so obviously keeping vigil for it.</p><p>Steve also drank a lot. Couldn’t get drunk, but had drank and drank while their hosts had gotten completely wasted and danced the night away. It was also when Steve had started sending him looks, flushed and dropping his gaze whenever he met it, before shaking his head to himself, lost in his own thoughts.</p><p>“Bucky,” Steve said at some point in the night. “Am I drunk.”</p><p>“You can’t get drunk,” he reminded him gently.</p><p>“I look at you and I see a miracle,” Steve said as if he hadn’t spoken.</p><p>He pulled on a smile, looking at him.</p><p>“Am I drunk?”</p><p>He shook his head. Steve smiled.</p><p>He looked at him and saw only devastation. The target he had been unable to destroy.</p><p>Looked around and saw only slightly better—people crying over dead bodies who were his victims. If not dead then not the target and so only screams to be ignored. Bodies around which to search for targets. Crushed skulls, bloodied chest cavities through which to search for targets. Severed throats across which to check for a mission accomplished.</p><p>He looked over at him and saw, not a miracle, but carnage.</p><p>Steve reached forward, touched the baby soft cloth of his sling—that first night it had been the cobalt blue—before striking a finger across his stomach, like lighting a match. “You all right there, Buck?”</p><p>He’d nodded.</p><p>When the sky outside had started turning a flower yellow, something he’d never seen before but which the Wakandans declared was the dawn approaching and so began straggling home, loud instructions to them that the hovercraft would take them back where they’d come from. There, he’d found another moment of secret bemusement, briefly amusing himself wondering whether to tell Steve that Captain America had had a little too much to drink and to invite him back to his place to sleep it off.</p><p>He smiled for a long time thinking it, the old line being used on his best friend, who as far as he knew, couldn’t get drunk. Unable to shake visions of waking up the following morning to a grateful kiss for safe accommodations and a gentle plea for a cab. To which he would always say sure thing while secretly hoping for something more.</p><p>Now spying Steve’s demure smile, while their hosts, abandoning them, loudly reminding them again about the hovercraft, he found himself wondering at that. Whether dames had been this coy, and him merely a patsy, thinking he’d had the one-up on them. Like . . . now, pretending to be drunk and needing him to foot accommodation until morning. Until he woke in his living room, hastily running wet hands through his hair in preparation of their emergence from the bedroom, praying he looked as good in their eyes as the night before. Hoping they would still see Bucky—<i>Yer eyes ah so bewtiful, Bucky, yer marhble eyes,</i>—when they too awoke from inside his bedroom and strolled out, needing a cab to  the Staten Island Ferry.</p><p>Astonishingly, those were the sweet, unharried memories that were coming to him.</p><p>And hilariously, the vibes he was getting from Steven Rogers smiling coyly at him. Until he was laughing and shaking his head. Happy, and okay. Completely okay.</p><p>“Ah, I’m wasted,” Steve said, as their hosts disappeared one by one, leaving lingering, rainbow-effected light waves across their vision. “It’s auto-piloted!” they called back.</p><p>“Yeah, yeah,” Steve said, entirely to something else. “I know I can’t get drunk, but I sure as hell am. Tried as a dog.” Then, “Mind if I crash on yer couch, Buck?”</p><p>He smiled.</p><p>“Promise I won’t make a sound.”</p><p>“Sure thing, Steve.”</p><p>And back in his royal apartments, Steve stripping bare-chested in his living room and tossing the 107th tee somewhere. “<i>Tired,</i>” Steve declared. “Shoot! Dang! Hang out wit’ some young Africans to know you’re <i>old.</i> You all right there, Buck?”</p><p>He’d said nothing. Staring at Steve.</p><p>Seeing nothing but a bloodied pulp.</p><p>He’d been overstimulated tonight.</p><p>At his failure to respond, maybe knowing they weren’t about to have a night laughing about the wiles of dames, Steve had first turned and looked at him with concern, then, slipping his hands into his pockets, suppressed a pain Steve didn’t have to explain.</p><p>The following morning, however, he’d come out of the bedroom to find Steve up an’ at ‘em. Awaiting him over another big-fuck breakfast.</p><p>“Look at <i>you.</i> Fresh as the mountain dew. Yer eyes always this blue in the morning, Buck? Or ar’ ya jes happy to be in Wonderland?”</p><p>He’d smiled at Steve, that morning realizing that he loved him. </p><p>Waving him over for what was apparently going to be their traditional Wakandan breakfast, Steve said, “Look’a this. These people got no problems, ya’ ask me.”</p><p>It was day one of what proved to be five, and he’d been slinged in banana yellow, which had them both looking, smiling at it.</p><p>“What’cha gonna do first thing after you wake up?” Steve asked, quiet for a while after they had kicked into the food.</p><p>Piling up some bacon on his scrambled eggs, he’d said nothing. But seeing that Steve really did expect an answer, he’d shrugged.</p><p>“Not gonna go for all the dames ya can?”</p><p>He’d taken a long, silent breath, said nothing. Then, “Doubt they’d want me, after the mess I am.”</p><p>“Nah, nah. Stop kiddin’ yerself, Buck. You’re an eligible bachelor till the end of time. Or,” Steve corrected, while piling even more food onto his fresh baked bread sandwich. “Having worn the dames out, you’d just be tired of that life. Either way, whatever you chose, you’d be a success.”</p><p>He’d eaten with no response. Steve trying to make him feel good about a post-hellish life he couldn’t picture. That was his guy. He turned to him.</p><p>“You think so?” he asked him.</p><p>“What, that you’ll be a success at whatever you put yer mind to after this?” Steve reopened his sandwich and piled on some more fried plantain. “You really need me to tell you that, Buck?”</p><p>“Nah,” he said gently. “Just asking if after all this you think I’ll still be an eligible bachelor.”</p><p>Steve had broken into laughter. Laughed and laughed, and said, “Yeh, Bucks. Oh, yeh.”</p><p>When the table was all eaten, remainder chunks of bacon and sausage and plantain running endangered as they chased them down, Steve said, “You know what we should do today, Buck?”</p><p>He’d glanced at Steve, because he’d thought today he was going under.</p><p>“We should see the country. Remember how we always talked about it in Europe, how if there wasn’t a war goin’ on it sure would be a great place to visit? So what’s the rush here?”</p><p>No rush that he could see. Only delay.</p><p>“Yeah, that sounds all right.”</p><p>Word had been sent to the lab. And without waiting for a response, Steve had arranged their ride. Which had been crazy cool. The palace had supplied them with a Mag Wave-Rider, both of them falling quiet at the scenery.</p><p>“Look at this,” Steve said, in a continued theme since arriving, as if seeking confirmation that were he to confirm that they still saw, felt, and heard in the same way, it would prove that nothing was wrong. That everything would be okay.</p><p>The following day, same. This time, to descend and stroll around, petting wild animals in the grasslands.</p><p>Steve stayed with him in Wakanda for almost a week.</p><p>After the first couple of days however, they hadn’t done much travel. Instead they went for hours-long walks, talked about the war like the pair of octogenarian vets they were. Steve asked him what he could remember. He remembered the same thing the average person could once prodded. Some memories clear, others fuzzy, but for him, nearly all scrambled of context and certainly of feeling. It was the fifty years after that were cut like diamonds into his mind.</p><p>Had that been their entire experience, he wondered whether Steve would have ever left.</p><p>Showered, at nights, they sat in his bathroom. Which was about the size of the bedroom. Ready for bed, Steve had taken over care of his arm against the morning. He hadn’t asked for it. But when on their second night Steve had lifted a finger at him and said he wanted to take care of that, and he’d shaken his head, telling him he could manage, Steve had slowly approached. “I wasn’t asking, Buck.” And as on the Quinjet, he had known not to argue. Not when it was in fact easier than doing it himself.</p><p>So there they sat in smooth bamboo chairs, Steve facing his side, him facing the wall with his legs stretched before him. And each night Steve merely continuing from wherever Steve had left off talking for the day.</p><p>Steve was a little quieter that fifth night, setting aside rolls of bandages, the color scheme Steve having selected for the following morning being grass green. Meaning, after the ointments and creams, he would get wrapped in the green bandages whose material neither of them could figure out but which felt better than anything he had ever experienced. Then in the morning he would match it with the green, baby soft cloth that would then be his sling. Being day five, they had gone through blue, yellow, orange, and fire-red. Day six was to be purple. Although, Steve corrected him, according to the inscription on the decorated bamboo box in which the bandage and cloth set came, it was actually “violet.” They’d laughed softly to themselves.</p><p>“Why all’a this?” Steve had asked. “It’s so you remember to change it every day,” he’d answered. Steve nodded, fell silent. “You have anyone who did this for you, all those years?” He shook his head. “What’d you do, after? When it was just you. How’d you figure it out?” He sat and stared for a long time at the wall. “I searched on the internet.” Steve stared at him for a long time as well. Then, having laid out all the materials he would need, Steve picked up and uncapped the grassy smelling ointment and squeezed a quantity on his fingers. And began massaging it into his stump. </p><p>Up the remainder of his arm, into his shoulder. </p><p>Being their fifth night, he’d expected that Steve would have been used to seeing the lightening, dull red scars snaking up his arm and across his shoulder. But each night, Steve ran his thumb along nearly each one, as though on a head count. Some nights it would mostly lull him to sleep. Combined with Steve’s voice, it seemed to replace . . . crucial things in his life.</p><p>That fifth night, Steve was telling him about having to deal with some politician back in ’43. Writing letters back home while they’d been in Europe, trying to get some homeward measures passed for their district in Brooklyn. Steve seemed to think he should know whom Steve was talking about.</p><p>“I dreamt about us—” he interrupted, at some point. And when Steve raised a look at him, “About . . . us.”</p><p>“You did?” He nodded. “What about?”</p><p>“We were in the war.”</p><p>“Oooh, dat wa’n no dream, Buck.”</p><p>He smiled. “And then it changed. And I . . . I had my arm . . . and I was . . . hunting you.”</p><p>Steve didn’t say anything at first. Then, “That was just some mission Alexander Pierce gave you. You’d never do anything like that otherwise.”</p><p>He slowly turned and looked at Steve. “Who wouldn’t?”</p><p>“You, Bucky,” Steve said without missing a beat. “You’re the guy every guy wishes he could be. All this talk about superheroes and people don’t even know what that is.”</p><p>And after a while, confused, he muttered, “Well, what is it?”</p><p>“You,” Steve repeated, emphatically. “You’re faithful, loyal to the end. I was living in my own world most of the time, busy having my own problems. And probably causing other people a lotta headaches. And you were there— just— you were looking out for me the whole time. You were tireless.” Steve dropped his hands, letting out a sigh. “If it weren’t for you, I’d probably be dead in an alley somewhere, or permanently hospitalized. So no, Bucky. You’ve never harmed me, and you’ve never wanted to. You were only being used, and frankly it was pure random luck which side got to use you.”</p><p>He’d been staring at the wall while the words poured from Steve. Words he struggled to understand. Steve resumed caring for his arm, capping and setting down the ointment, now picking up and unscrewing the bottle of cream lying next to the rolls of four-inch, bright green bandages.</p><p>“You think I wouldn’t harm you now?” he asked slowly. Turned and met Steve’s eyes, which were on him. “You believe that?”</p><p>“Of course you wouldn’t, Buck.”</p><p>“How can you be so sure?”</p><p>“Because for two years you’ve harmed no one.”</p><p>“Because,” he said slowly, “for two years no one spoke the right words to me.”</p><p>When Steve seemed to stop talking for no reason, he turned and looked again at him. Steve had his head down, a hand on his thigh. Prompting him to look down at his arm, wondering at Steve abandoning the job in the middle of it. Instead of an exposed stump, he saw bright green bandages almost geometrically neatly wrapped around his residual arm. All the bottles capped, bandages rolled up, put away into the bamboo box, box closed and pushed away. Every drop of water around the bathtub and sink wiped off, their used towels neatly placed in the wide bamboo laundry basket at their feet.</p><p>He could only guess how much time had passed. How much time he had lost.</p><p>And asking only seemed like it would add to Steve’s torment.</p><p>Steve slowly set his forehead to his shoulder, hooked his arm there and said nothing else for the remainder of that night.</p><p>The following morning, Steve took him to Shuri’s lab. </p><p>“We’re ready,” Steve told her.</p><p>Their separation was excruciating for Steve. He wished he could make it less so.</p><p>They stood in Shuri’s lab, his arm not in grass green but mourning black. Arms limp at his side, Steve’s hands on him.</p><p>“Buck, I’ll write. I mean— I’ll call. Or— whatever’s done these days. I’ll do it. Expect a message from me daily if I can manage it. That’s the baseline. You get me?’</p><p>He nodded, while Steve’s eyes again went past his shoulder. Without Steve needing to say it, he saw Steve’s conflicting arguments. Too many, too late. That exactly ten months later, Steve himself would tell him so he wouldn’t have to guess: Was this really necessary? Was it better? Did it really matter, and would it make a difference? Couldn’t they have managed like so many of their fellow soldiers returning home from war, having to deal with so much more. Couldn’t they find a way to cope that didn’t involve a threat to his mind. </p><p><i>“Bucky, I should have had more courage, and I’m sorry that I risked your life because I was so scared.”</i> I wasn’t your choice to make, he would tell him, in that distant, very different, hard to believe future, touching him in a way that on that morning of his stasis, would have stopped his heart. Both their hearts. <i>“I know, I know. I know,”</i> came the quiet, breathless reply. <i>“But I’m still sorry . . .”</i></p><p>Sometimes in the future when he dreamt of that morning, he saw his own tears leaking from Steve’s eyes. Steve whom he had never seen cry. But Steve would cry in his dreams, asking him what fifty years of waking and dying felt like.</p><p>“I’ll call you every day,” Steve repeated, evidently wrapping up mission parameters. “Until you wake, I’ll write ya.” Steve then laughed, to himself. “Meaning you’ll probably wake up to a ton of useless messages you don’t need.” Steve sniffed. Head down. Was quiet. “Tell me ya hear me, Buck.”</p><p>He’d nodded. And because Steve had needed to hear it, feel it, he’d lifted his hand and touched Steve’s shoulder. And waited while Steve inhaled sharply, releasing long, quiet breaths. He said to Steve, “Can’t wait to hear ‘em.”</p><p>Steve sniffed, nodded. Raised his head, his bright blue eyes dry and on him, then stepped back.</p><p>Shuri immediately set the machine to life, waving him over to the narrow lab bed. Moving from Steve’s embrace, he went and sat on the white linen. Steve meanwhile went and stood by the machine and proceeded to stare at it, in the way of several lab technicians and not caring. “Captain <i>Rojaz,</i>” Shuri finally, firmly said. And with a final look at her, Steve backed off. Lowering his head, he hid his smile and sat quietly on the lab bed, waiting.</p><p>Then he was being waved over. And gently ushered inside. And being told in kind tones that he would simply close his eyes “like it’s sleep” and open them again, and everything would be well. He sent his gaze to Steve, who stood there without a single thing showing on his face. Then, before closing his eyes, he saw Steve’s single nod at him.</p><p>And he knew then that they would be seeing again soon. </p><p>Because Cap never lied.</p><p>—</p><p>Waking, the night after Shuri had called him up, after the goat skin buyer had told him his dreams of <i>Elileh</i> were hungry dreams of wanting dick, basically, he sat up abruptly. Breathing so harshly he was nearly hyperventilating.</p><p>He was also on the floor. With an erection.</p><p>He looked down at himself. Breathing around his hardly focusing eyes. Having gone, in terms of physical setting, and seemingly in an instant, from zero to the brightest, most intense of sensations. And then flopping back down on his back, gasping. Trying to catch the remaining wisps of his dream.</p><p><i>Hiya, Buck,</i> the dream had begun.</p><p>•</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. SITUATION REPORT</h2></a>
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            <p>Buck's in Wakanda, awake and healing, unknown to Steve. But Steve is facing eight months alone and counting... and Sam had said something about letters Bucky wrote during the War.. </p><p>Threads you probably shouldn't pull unless you're ready, hashtag.</p>
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</p><p>Nothing about this was easy, for some reason. Even though it should have been. What was so complicated about an internet search? It had been among the first skills he had acquired on waking from the ice. Granted, he’d since fallen out of the habit since it still mainly struck him as secretarial work, and because at SHIELD someone usually just handed him whatever information he was meant to have. Still he’d watched Natasha do it often enough, and Buck had managed it for self-care without need for assistance from a worldwide organization. It involved inputting search parameters and the like. Easy stuff. Which he’d done. Next, tap on the Smithsonian Institutes URL, then on the Captain America archives. Anything Avengers being among their most popular, those were right there on the front page. So tap again, swipe up . . . scrolling slowly . . . and at James Buchanan Barnes, stop. Then tap one more time, and see and read everything the Institute had on Bucky.</p><p>Yet he wasn’t seeing Bucky’s letters anywhere.</p><p>Sighing, frustration at a low sizzle, he hooked an arm over the back of his chair and eyed the console. This was going to entail some special thing to be done in addition, he just knew it. Something that would involve asking Sam. Like needing a sign-in account. Meanwhile he didn’t even want anyone knowing he was looking at this, not caring to give anyone further reason to go poking around anything to do with Bucky. Bad enough that every swipe across his screen was probably being monitored by Nick Fury and God knew who else with clearance, triple that with the world’s governments now knowing the identity of the Winter Soldier. Every one of them would give lip service to understanding the mental health needs of a war veteran even while in actuality scramble to be the first to get their hands on Bucky. </p><p>The thought roiled his stomach. Coming off the mess with Tony, he didn’t need reminders of just how far he’d go to keep Bucky safe.</p><p>Stalling, he turned and looked out the picture widows of his quarters, watching the white haze of upper atmosphere as the Helicarrier sailed the skies. And Sam, champion of vet needs notwithstanding, would suck in his cheeks and do a terrible job of maintaining serious-face while actually thinking a number of things, all beginning with <i>Hollee. . . cherry pops!</i> Except that Sam didn’t say things like cherry pops, so only the limits of the imagination could quite contain what later conversations would be like.</p><p>Closing the laptop, he stood from his desk, accepting his fate.</p><p>“So an account or something,” he concluded soon after, carting both his and Sam’s trays while leading them to their table. Sam had both their Stark Industries pads in each hand, looking left to right at the oh-sure, definitely-not-from-Tony-Stark intel, on tracing Chitauri weapons that had done a remarkably efficient job of proliferating across the globe.</p><p>The mess hall as usual was storming with SHIELD personnel. Almost immediately, he’d sighted Richard Jones, the “classified-assignment” operative who seemed to have developed some weird personal agenda on him. At least he hoped for Nick Fury’s sake it was merely personal. Rick was in the company of a top SHIELD deputy director, whom he happened to know by sight as one of Nick’s top deputies. So that wasn’t suspicious at all.</p><p>“An account?” Sam asked, head down to the pads.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>Several meters away at their nine o’clock, Rick and the director stood just then from their table, headed for the exit. And once more, Rick sent a look over his shoulder at him. Still with his inexplicable smirk. This from a man he didn’t in fact know. Never been introduced to, didn’t know a thing about. Except from the truly strange, sick incident of showing up at a house in Arnhem where he’d been quartered during his early SHIELD years, dressed as Bucky.</p><p>No, not dressed as Bucky — <i>as</i> Bucky. Transformed in a way he still didn’t understand. But for that Rick had appeared as Bucky right after enlistment, rather than what Bucky looked like even two years into the War, he might have questioned his own mind. Neither had anyone yet explained Rick’s incredible physical strength.</p><p>Now at their table, ignoring Rick’s departure, he pulled out their chairs with his foot.</p><p>“An account for what?” Sam asked.</p><p>“Put those down and listen to what I’m asking.”</p><p>“I hear you fine,” Sam said, setting the pads on the table, taking his seat and pulling his tray toward him. “I’m just confused as to why you need <i>an account.</i>”</p><p>“That’s what I’m asking,” he said a little fervently.</p><p>“Those archives are available right on Shield’s database. In higher resolution no less.”</p><p>He blinked at Sam. “What?”</p><p>So in the time it took to stand back up, snatching a couple of Sam’s plastic bottles of orange juice as he bailed, he was seated back inside his quarters, staring at his laptop screen. Quite unexpectedly having fallen into a space he hadn’t seen right in front of him. One which would swallow his world whole for the next several days. And from which he would not emerge the same.</p><p>And looking back a year later, the feeling hadn’t even glimpsed the magnitude of change coming to his life.</p><p>On his screen were Bucky’s letters from the War. Or rather, the archives containing them.</p><p>But Sam was wrong. These weren’t letters. Not in the traditional sense anyway. The pages were journal entries Bucky had written in the form of letters — sheets of bonded paper continually added into a handmade Italian journal binder; a thick hide of wraparound leather with a clasp and thinner strips to wrap it closed, of the sort most of the men stationed in Italy had picked up for just such a purpose. Letters which Bucky had never mailed. Likely for the obvious reason of wanting to skip wartime censorship and keep a more truthful version of his personal story in war. It had been illegal to keep journals, but for the sake of maintaining sanity, most soldiers had.</p><p>And here were Bucky’s.</p><p>It was Bucky talking to him from across time. From when Bucky had still been Bucky — <i>his</i> Bucky; the nicest, most caring, most <i>decent</i> person he had ever met. Talking about him in a time when . . . he hadn’t been anything resembling <i>self-aware.</i></p><p>Sam couldn’t know. For Sam it was <i>Bucky</i> talking about <i>Steve.</i> But Sam neither knew nor had he ever met the Steve and Bucky in those letters.</p><p>Belatedly, his heart was awake in his rib cage.</p><p>Belated, because here he was, seventy years later, and only now considering what it must have been like for Bucky seeing him there in the mudfields of Europe, after believing he’d left him safe and sound on the blacktops of Brooklyn. Safe in the uniform of a mail clerk in a backroom, if he’d even been lucky, while everyone else wore a soldier’s uniform and went to the Front. Most of the borough by mid-1942 having made it into the regiments their parents had served in during the Great War. <i>Stay home. Please Steve, for me. Stay.</i> Euphoric at having scored <i>their</i> regiment and instantly plunging himself into missions, he had never once stopped to consider what it might have felt like for Bucky. Not then, and he was ashamed to say, not even until that very moment.</p><p>Looking at Bucky’s archive, something else seemed to be rising to the surface. Not about his anguish-filled 1942 per se — the year that was the zenith of everything he had kicked and punched against his whole sorry life — but rather about self-awareness.</p><p>A gentle tapping for his attention. Trying to make him turn all the way around. If he was going to look, the tapping seemed to be meaning, then why not turn and look at everything. </p><p>It was a clear, sure sensation that left him wordless.</p><p>No way was he going straight to Bucky’s letters.</p><p>Setting the bottles of orange juice on the desk’s edge, away from the laptop, he gave himself time to catch up with his enthusiasm. Then seated comfortably, he explored the larger archive.</p><p>Much to his surprise, he saw that every member of their special unit, the Howling Commandos, had kept a journal. All except him. Then he was curbing a smile, recalling that whomever had come up with the ludicrous name was still among the U.S. military’s best kept secrets, as there had been death threats. But everyone appeared to have kept a journal — archived separately along with Bucky’s within the larger 107th’s.</p><p>He took a moment. The unit’s archive? He’d only come looking to read Bucky’s letters because of Sam’s odd and . . . disorientating . . . characterization of the tone of Bucky’s writings. Which could be total nonsense. <i>Was</i> probably nonsense, but which he confidently felt he could see without disrupting his day. But to read everyone’s letters?</p><p>Staring out at the diffused sunlight on the clouds, he listened to how the thought sounded in his head. How it wasn’t generating an automatic no.</p><p>From almost as early as he’d been woken from the ice, he’d made a rule not to include his personal experience as part of his exploration of the Second World War. He could come up with a hundred cerebral reasons, but it boiled down to just one — he didn’t want it that way. Not after unpreparedly sitting through videos of Peggy talking in retrospect about a past he hadn’t gotten to live. Seeing her again after what merely felt like a long sigh, not dressed and waiting for him to take her dancing, but in a nursing home at the tail end of a lifetime waiting for him. Not after having looked across a battle zone and seen <i>Bucky.</i> Alive — and on an inexplicable dark parallel of his own strange life.</p><p>The memory still rattled him badly, and already he could feel his emotions rising. That anyone could do such a thing to Bucky still broke pieces off him.</p><p>Trawling the Smithsonian like a lost orphan on first waking had delivered enough personal shocks to last his two lifetimes. He’d lived history, thanks, and now history had its records. More than enough without his personal contribution.</p><p>Yet . . . here he was, about to break his own rule. Disobediently eyeing his screen because . . . He didn’t know why exactly. Self-awareness? </p><p>Releasing a breath, he entered his unit’s page.</p><p>Just as Sam had promised, the scans were clearly done by a very high resolution optical reader. The unit having been formed after he’d liberated a chunk of the regiment from Hydra’s prison factory installation, and specifically during the regiment’s later furlough to London in September of ’43, he chose entries after that date. And read them all. Every one. Whipping through them like a snapped zip line. There were audio interviews too. He didn’t even know when he hit play, but was soon seated forward, arms folded on the desk, reeling from emotion. Hardly believing the things coursing through him. </p><p>Suddenly he was listening to Jackie Dernier, Gabe Jones, Pinky Pinkerton, Monty, Sawyer, Dugan, Jim Morita — raspy old men by then — telling their stories, the unit’s stories, from the War.</p><p>Heart squeezing, he laughed breathlessly as Dugan rumbled, <i>“Ah, you got him in the right mood? Steve was a terror,”</i> and Dernier, the real terror, grunting in agreement. All of them telling of things he had long wrapped up and stored deep inside — missions, drink-fests, so many little incidents . . . <i>“And screw-ups with a capital eff,”</i> Sawyer threw in.</p><p>He listened until it was almost too much to bear. He and Bucky had been ripped away from them. One moment part of a unit of men, and for him personally, who depended on and believed in him — the next to hear them telling them, decades into the future, that they were neither lost nor gone from their hearts. With all of them now gone. And him and Bucky somehow present. It wasn’t normal. Wasn’t right.</p><p>He was so sorry to have left them. So sorry to have fallen when he should remained standing among them. He should have been the last one down. </p><p>Head bent, he listened. </p><p><i>“Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes,”</i> an old Jim Morita rasped. <i>“They were good men, our brothers, and we were heartbroken to have lost them.”</i> </p><p>How was he not crying? Why could he not cry and get some of what he’d so reliably heard, from Natasha no less, was a deep physical release. He’d seen his fellow vets do it and heard the sighs afterward, and would gladly exchange a week-long headache for one of those.</p><p>Sighing quietly, he slowly sat back. But he did know why. Maybe one day, but not right now. Not as long as Bucky needed him.</p><p>What service to their collective memories would crying do anyway. He took solace that what they had given lives, limbs, and sanity for — a greater belief in good — had panned out. They had won. And many of them had lived with their grandchildren to see the world they had done it for. There lived real comfort.</p><p>Tapping out of Jim’s archive, he stayed a little longer in the unit’s looking through photos. Smiling at the then-and-nows. Gabe had been totally right about who would lose their hair and in just what pattern. And he felt it inside, though no tears came, but he felt it, because there was Gabe with a smug smile having shaved his own head and opted instead for a full salt-and-pepper beard and looked appropriately distinguished. He took another quiet breath when he realized he was scanning the pictures for him and Bucky. Repeatedly. So, saying a silent goodbye to his friends, he tapped out of the photos archives as well.</p><p>So, he thought wryly, having thoroughly trampled himself emotionally, he was all set to tackle Bucky Barnes’s journal, huh.</p><p>Bucky’s letters were recorded on audio as well. Not by Bucky, obviously. Quite carelessly, he tapped play on the first one.</p><p><i>Becca,</i> a stranger’s rich voice suddenly flowed from his laptop, filling up his quarters. <i><span class="u">Steve</span> is here.</i></p><p>He reached out and immediately stopped playback.</p><p>And sat staring at the screen as though he’d just been bitten by a wasp.</p><p>And did nothing whatsoever for a very long time.</p><p>That had been both weird and . . . intense.</p><p>Thank God he was alone. </p><p>Reaching once more, though more slowly for the trackpad, he tapped his way back to the text section. Here he was presented with the option of reading Bucky’s letters either in Buck’s original handwriting, or, wonders of modern tech, rendered in a “web friendly” font. Staring at the screen, he took in the computer generated, very readable option, and saw nothing he recognized. No Bucky there. He chose the entries in Buck’s original hand.</p><p>Letters loaded, he stood from the desk, detaching the screen, and took it with him in pad form to his bed. The bright sunlight still had a couple hours to go before sunset, so he lowered his screens against it, casting his quarters into a gauzy dimness. He got in bed, laid on his back, propped a pillow on his stomach and set the pad against it.</p><p>Recalling timelines perfectly and too excited to start chronologically, he was scrolling, looking for a letter following . . . Sighing, seeing exactly what he wanted, he tapped on Bucky’s first letter from after he’d liberated the prisoners from Hydra. </p><p>Getting comfortable, he tucked a hand behind his head and began reading.</p><p>Several hours later, he set aside the pad and sat up, gripping the edge of the mattress.</p><p>It was Sam. Sam had put ideas in his head.</p><p>There was nothing in the letters . . . just the usual homebound moral boosting stuff . . . things even the public had read in national exhibits . . .  </p><p>
  <i>Don’t kid yourself . . .</i>
</p><p>His heart was going like a jackrabbit’s. Like it used to all his life in Brooklyn. Struggling to pump efficiently as he continually overexerted himself, putting health and limb in danger trying to keep up with everyone  else. Here it was once more, everything inside going all at once and out of his control. Like a wild alarm.</p><p>Sam had played him based on knowledge of his and Bucky’s closeness, that was all. No random member of the public, or even the greatest of Howling Commando fans, could have made him see what Sam had insisted was there.</p><p>And it was jarring, that was all. Unexpectedly . . . intimate to Bucky’s thoughts in all this darkness . . . the sun has since set . . . and surprising to imbibe a different perspective on experiences he thought he knew.</p><p>It was also Bucky’s writing. Bucky’s words and imagery taking him so vividly back to a time and place, to sounds — the relentless clatter of munitions on wood and steel, the calls of men’s raised voices, with the underlying, pervasive sense that someone better know what was going on and for the Army to make sure that person was put in charge; the constant revving, crunching sounds of deuces and jeeps, and the distant sounds of machine gun fire and explosions, often interrupting equally distant music, always playing.</p><p>These were the things, the long buried memories contributing to him suddenly feeling that he was at the bottom of a giant pile-on from a gang of relentless, bigger kids. Forcing him to <i>look.</i> And <i>see.</i></p><p>He turned toward the windows, seeing not sunshine but night. The Helicarrier’s running lights, green on this side, washed brightly across pale clouds.</p><p>Could also be that his calorie-hungry body, which he’d neither fed breakfast, lunch nor dinner, not even those fake orange juice things in the plastic bottles on his desk, was severely depleted and about going into shock. He stood from the bed.</p><p>He needed to go eat.</p><p>—</p><p>Inside the mostly empty cafeteria, straggling skeleton crew dotting the large space, he was nodding wearily and occasionally while listening to the server behind the counter complaining something about Iron Man and his kids and a birthday party years ago, and how things had changed — “World’s ending every other day now, no time for kids’ birthday parties, I guess . . .”</p><p>He should never have been able to digest any of it, from lack of simple interest, never mind with a head and chest filled with thoughts that felt physical. But being that he could absorb ten things at once without trying, he was hearing all about the time the man won some organization-wide employee raffle and got his kids to rub shoulders, his words, with Alexander Pierce’s children at Pierce’s D.C. mansion, and then Iron Man showed up and took the kids for a ride and showed them all kinds of — if you asked him — dangerous sounding stuff, and wow was that a party and weren’t those the days.</p><p>Thankfully, the man was also actually getting him some food. It was just that he required a lot of food, so this was getting to be what felt like hours to put together a tray. </p><p>He took himself to a table after, and not bothering to offload the tray, simply ate everything in front of him. Then he stood for a second round. Returned, sat, and repeated. He’d certainly needed food.</p><p>
  <i>You should never have left him.</i>
</p><p>He lowered his head, the food having lost all taste. But his mind ran, accusingly and too fast, too suddenly. And whatever had been tapping at him that morning, quietly asking just how <i>self-aware</i> he really thought he’d become, had ditched subtlety and was now grabbing and shaking him.</p><p>
  <i>You’ve barely been holding it together for eight months. You should have stayed with him. He would never have left you.</i>
</p><p>He closed his eyes for a moment, willing that set of memories which he’d suspended in his mind to stay suspended. Beyond anything he had ever experienced emotionally, so from the moment he could, iced. But already he felt as though he could actually feel warm water in his sneakers as the memories seemed to already be thawing themselves without his say-so.</p><p>When he looked down at his food again, he saw he’d since cleared his second tray. Sighing, he stood up. And the server behind the counter paled. Holding up a hand, he signaled he wouldn’t be returning for a third round. He did however grab a cold sandwich on his way out.</p><p>Walking down the long, dark corridor of their section of the deck, he took his time finishing the sandwich, wiping his hand on an included napkin and finding a bin to trash everything. And then spied Sam down at the other end talking to a SHIELD techie. Their quarters were among a handful on this section of the Helicarrier, not far from the VIP ones. All of which he’d heard many mumbled “thanks to Stark” remarks in the last half year since he, Sam and Natasha re-joined Nick Fury’s resuscitated SHIELD. A turn of events which, much as he wished it desperately, Natasha had insisted he not confront Fury over, and that they just take the gift of regaining more resources for their mission. He’d dropped it. For now.</p><p>Point being, their section of the carrier was upper decks as the sailors called it, and the chances that a SHIELD technician needed their attention at this time of night was slim to none. Confirmed when he overheard the trivial nature of the conversation. There was nothing going on over there that couldn’t have waited until morning. <i>Late</i> morning.</p><p>On spying him, Sam hurriedly dismissed the techie and began a slow approach like it was all a big coincidence. Reaching the entrance to his quarters, long before he got to his, Sam gave him a casual, “Hey, Cap.”</p><p>Then, pausing at entering his code, Sam slowly turned a hot pair of eyes on him. “You get into those archives all right?”</p><p>“Yeah. Thanks.”</p><p>“So you’re up for air,” Sam said, assuredly. “Or maybe just giving that right hand a break, am I right. From typing,” Sam added smoothly. Shaking his head, he just made his way to his own door. “Just remember there’s a . . .” Sam tilted back his head, chuckled, as though the thought just occurred to him and it was hilarious. “There’s a . . . personal fire extinguisher in your room in case the bedsheets catch fire.”</p><p>And then would you believe it, the door to Natasha’s quarters slid open, her head poking out into the corridor. “I thought I heard your voices,” she said intensely. </p><p>Then, staring at Sam, she whispered, “What’s going on? Archives? Hot in his quarters? What’s he doing, is it about a date? Is he looking up that chick from ops?”</p><p>Sam sucked in air between his lips. “From <i>ops . . . ?</i> No.”</p><p>Natasha’s eyes widened. “From where? Which one.” </p><p>“<i>The</i> one.”</p><p>Natasha frowned heavily. “Peggy Carter? Steve,” she said kindly, “no. You should stop.” </p><p>“Nooooo,” Sam said, so loudly it was a surprise the entire deck didn’t gather to find out what was going on. “Noo.”</p><p>Natasha was still frowning. “I’m totally confused.” </p><p>“Really, Romanov?” he couldn’t help teasing, causing Sam to break into loud, sustained laughter.</p><p>Smirking, he tapped in his code, entered his quarters.</p><p>Inside, he didn’t go beyond the door. Leaned against the wall instead, hands deep inside his pockets, lowered his head.</p><p>Feeling a lot of things, none of which he cared to go into. </p><p>Problem was, not one of those things minded going into him.</p><p>When Sam had labeled the letters <i>unrequited,</i> leaving him mostly bemused, he’d told Sam that if Bucky had harbored those kinds of feelings towards him he’d be flattered. Well, he’d been nearly there, if by flattered he meant he could jump from the Helicarrier’s jet landing strips into the clear blue sky shouting with happiness all the way down.</p><p>Which, he thought, resting his head against the wall, was as confusing as it got. Not exactly the reaction he should be having, if he remembered his own self correctly. </p><p>He’d known he’d be flattered, simply because he worshipped Bucky. </p><p>But what he was feeling went worlds beyond flattery. Solar systems beyond.</p><p>Even as parts of him insisted he stand fast, that it was Sam all the way, he’d never been a Brooklynite to kid himself. You had only to see your mother succumb, he supposed, after being sickly all your life and fully assuming it would be you, to understand that certain kinds of people couldn’t afford to play games with themselves.</p><p>He sent his gaze toward the bed. There was no putting . . . <i>that</i> back into the bottle.</p><p>Slowly, he shook his head in the darkness. “<i>Bucky . . .</i>” he complained, whispering because it was all he could do while already being swamped with memories. “<i>One of us better know what we’re doing.</i>”</p><p>Even before Dr. Erskine changed his life with his serum, he had always had a very good memory. Possibly to ensure the survival of his continually trouble-seeking self. Post-serum, cognition wildly increased, his memories played out vibrantly, like movies, blaring in high definition sound and color.</p><p>He remembered . . . pretty much everything. Touch, taste, smell; sight and sound were merely the start . . . </p><p>He remembered it all.</p><p>—</p><p>All the way from the forest road they heard the clattering, clamoring, yelling of base camp responding to their imminent arrival. He did, anyway. Above them, sentries in trees were yelling at sentries down at guard posts: <i>Lift those arms, lift the arms! They’re here! Get ‘em up!</i></p><p>A sentry rushed out of the guardhouse, turning to see them marching up the cleared forest road, him at the head, the entire liberated prisoner contingent flanking him. Scouts had been reporting their arrival for a couple of days now, even from their distance they could see that the entire camp had emptied to wait for them. He could, anyway. He smiled in total bliss, turning to look at Bucky, who instantly met his gaze with the same . . . slightly . . . well, vacant look as all along the march, he had to say. They’d had little time to talk or do much else, as it had been a long march and Buck and many of the other prisoners were exhausted beyond conversation. The stronger soldiers had been tasked to scrounge for food and to make sure the sick and injured rested. Still they’d started very early that day and crossing into base camp was the priority right then.</p><p>Soon surrounded by wild shouts and cheering as the men grabbed and hugged each other; after Colonel Phillips came by to eye him hard for having executed the mission without authorization, and Peggy Carter came over to soak him with her own warmer one — boy, could he remember that stirring feeling — he felt as high as a fly-ball. Men who just days ago had been laughing him off a stage now grabbed and hugged him, crying thank-yous, and there he was getting his hand pumped by the same loon who’d shown him his bare ass.</p><p>“'Member me, Captain?” the corporal shouted, eyes shining with tears as he poked himself in the chest with a finger. “Your biggest fan! Always knew you had it in you, sir!”</p><p>Angling his head , he smiled as graciously as you pleased. “Why thank you, corporal. I never doubted your sincerity.”</p><p>Then he was being surged into the nearest barracks, a realization that took him unawares. A crowd had grown itself around him and wouldn’t be curtailed. The men were simply howling with joy. And just like that, he was inside barracks, where days ago he’d actually seen signs with the Captain America emblem and the word “BARRED!” stenciled across it. Now he was inside with them, instead of backstage with a bunch of performers. Immediately he saw why he’d been brought inside — some of the men from the failed operation were still on light duties and were required to rest when not on their feet. Now ushered ahead, he went to their bunks and shook their hands, feeling his heart near bursting with pride. “The honor is mine,” he told them, again and again. “It’s my honor to join the fight.”</p><p>And turning to look for where Bucky was, he couldn’t find him. But since soldiers were still hugging buddies and laughing and crying on each other, he assumed Bucky was somewhere getting the same reception. Well, he certainly planned on presiding over the big drink-up planned for the night. They all looked up as the barracks door banged open, hitting the wall with a loud crack. </p><p>Peggy Carter was standing there, a tight look of controlled tension on her face. </p><p>“Sergeant Barnes has collapsed.”</p><p>Peggy didn’t try and keep up. Charging around bodies, he was making for the regimental aid station she’d called to him Bucky had been taken before most of them even realized he had left.</p><p>Soldiers shrank back as he barreled through the still celebrating crowds and after what seemed like forever was finally standing before the regimental aid station tent, the giant white field containing the big red cross filling his vision like an alleyway bully. Two medics were conversing at the entrance, both of whom on seeing his storming approach had flattened themselves against the sides of the entrance.</p><p>“They were <i>experimenting</i> on him in that enemy base, Captain Rogers!” the medic to his right said energetically, affrontedly, staring wide-eyed at him. “H-he’s stable, the docs have him under and they’re waitin’ on him to recover— Division’s got <i>questions</i> for him and all— but it’s an <i>outrage</i> what they did to him!”</p><p>Pushing into the tent, he stopped, looking around. And there was Buck, at the far end of a row of canvas cots, drips and things connected to him. Crashing over, stumbling over things he couldn’t even identify, he stood over him with his heart going, staring as flashes of finding Bucky laid out in that Hydra experimentation room still moaning name-rank-and-serial, crowded his vision. He’d thought this was over.</p><p>“He’ll be all right, Captain,” came a calm, efficient voice behind him. “He’s merely sedated. So far we’ve found no cause for alarm.” Turning, he watched a doctor approach and bend over Bucky, requiring him to move himself out of the way.</p><p>“Then why’d he collapse?”</p><p>“I’m guessing a long march across mountain and forest terrain after you’ve been experimented and— on for weeks, should do it. Please, Captain, if you could just move over a little . . .”</p><p>It would not be for another seventy years, trawling the Smithsonian, that he would discover that the doctor’s hesitation that morning had been over the word <i>torture.</i> Bucky had been tortured by Arnim Zola. Long dead by the time he found out.</p><p>“Captain, please, you’re in the way.”</p><p>He shifted a little.</p><p>“Didn’t you happen to notice his condition during the march?” asked the doctor.</p><p>“Yeah but we made sure he got plenty of rest, along with all the other sick and injured prisoners.”</p><p>“Well, I’m sure you did what you could given the circumstances. Captain Rogers, please, I’m really going to need you to . . .”</p><p>He shifted some more. “Why’s Division coming down to question him?”</p><p>“That’s . . . what Division does.”</p><p>He looked toward the entrance, where Peggy was slowly coming toward them. Stopping next to him, she sighed quietly as she looked down at Bucky’s sleeping figure. Then she raised her gaze to him, sympathy and concern in her eyes. “Division’s also sending down specialists, Steve. If there’s anything wrong in his system, they’ll find it.” Then, gently taking his arm, “Come on. You really are quite physically large now and are most certainly in the way.”</p><p>Tests upon tests later, the docs from Division found nothing wrong with Bucky. None of their tests at the time would have been able to detect the Super Soldier serum anyway, especially having only started being introduced into Bucky’s system. Zola’s experimenting at the stage he’d crashed the installation had still been at testing Bucky’s physical fitness and resiliency for the procedure. But even that was later knowledge. At the time, neither he, Peggy, nor even Colonel Phillips had imagined that Zola had even a concept, much less the ability, to replicate the serum.</p><p>For the next three days, he was in debriefing after debriefing, first regurgitating every technical and visual piece of information he’d retained from the assault on Hydra’s installation, which turned out to be practically everything his eyesight had snapped, like a photograph. After that it was his observations of enemy activity from the march down. Listening intently to his precise, substantial recitations, Colonel Phillips maintained a tightened jaw, no doubt wishing renewed hell upon the spy who had taken Dr. Erskine’s life. </p><p>Whenever free, he was seated Bucky’s bedside. And Bucky had opened his eyes a few times, shifting his gaze around but clearly disoriented as to his present condition or whereabouts. Then Buck would start muttering name, rank and serial again — slowly, continually — before passing once more into sleep.</p><p>“This doesn’t feel right,” he insisted to the doctor on the third day, pointing toward Bucky while mindlessly looming over some other poor patient’s cot. Given Bucky’s state, it could only be the Super Soldier serum that was even allowing him to stay focused on the debriefings. “He sounds like how I found him. Why is he regressing?”</p><p>“Sergeant Barnes is recovering, not regressing,” the doctor countered, moving around him to his next patient. “So <i>that,</i>” the doctor nodded at Bucky, “is exactly right. Now, he’ll be disoriented on waking, with possible memory gaps, <i>which,</i>” the doc hastily spoke over his intended interruption, “will only be temporary. So just take it slow.” </p><p>Two evenings later, no longer being tested or sedated, Bucky opened his eyes to blink blearily, first at him, then around the aid station, before coming back to him. And staying on him. </p><p>“Steve? Wuh . . . I wasn’t dreaming? We’re outta there? You’re . . . here? And—” then a big, vast, chasm of dawning confusion “ . . . you really look like this?”</p><p>“Like what?” he teased, smiling.</p><p>Bucky only tightened everywhere, though remaining unmoving, and, he could have sworn, staring for at least five solid minutes. During the entire time, he told Bucky where he’d found him and what it looked like was going on there. If for no other reason than to jog Bucky’s memory for when Division came with their questions, not wanting them thinking Bucky was intentionally being evasive. </p><p>“Experimenting on you and all kinds of weird stuff,” he continued heatedly, unable to help his rising emotions. “No idea what for, though you might be able to say once all this sedation wears off.” Then he looked at Bucky, there in the aid station being the first real chance they’d actually had to be alone. “Buck,” he was suddenly saying, desperately, his voice barely above a whisper. “I can’t tell you what it felt like being on that disgrace of a USO tour and finding myself in front of <i>our</i> regiment — pop’s, New York’s 107th, and there I was, a costumed <i>idiot,</i> reciting <i>idiot</i> lines from some politician in Washington only to hear all’a you’d been captured. I could’a— I’d rather they shipped me home with a court martial. Thank Christ for Peggy. I don’t know how or what—” but he had to stop because the doctor was suddenly there and checking on Bucky, who was still staring at him.</p><p>Then the doctor told him he had to move along. Thinking he’d misheard, he looked up at the doc.</p><p>“Come back some other time, Captain,” the doctor said, eyes on his watch as he took Bucky’s pulse. “Give the sergeant time to rest. I’m not sure what part of take it slow you failed to understand.”</p><p>So, with Bucky’s silent gaze following him, he stood up, indicating behind the doctor’s back as he left that he’d be back soon. That evening Colonel Phillips assigned him, Dum Dum, Gabe and Pinky on a long range scouting mission. </p><p>Slightly before dawn, not sure when they would return, he told them to give him a minute while he checked on Bucky. </p><p>“How’s the sergeant doing?” Gabe asked, doing a last minute check of compasses and binoculars. </p><p>“Gonna go find out,” he called back, already out of the tent.</p><p>Halfway to the station, he got the same question from a squad of privates from Bucky’s platoon. Halting in their tracks across the muddy path to squawk at him like parrots. “Captain Rogers, is Sergeant Barnes— ”</p><p>“I’m gonna go see,” he called.</p><p>“Bust him outta there too, Cap. We need him back at platoon!” Hiding a smile, he moved on. He’d heard the sergeant temporarily replacing Bucky was a real pain in the rear. </p><p>But at the entrance to the aid station, the same doctor blocked him. “Captain,” the doc said, sighed, “the sun isn’t up.”</p><p>“Is Bucky?”</p><p>The doctor sighed.</p><p>“I promise,” he said solemnly, “one minute. Time it. How’s his memory,” he pushed on in lowered tones. “Is he all right?”</p><p>Again another sigh, then, indulgently, “The experiments are a blur, as is most of the march. But everything else . . .” the doctor sighed, stepped aside. “He’s fine.”</p><p>Pulling up the empty ammo crate serving as a seat, he sat down and looked at Bucky, feeling that his heart was going to pop from his chest. Buck was awake and seemed more alert. Although looking pale and tired — still prostrate on the bed and weak from both the sedation and a serum whose true effects they would not know for another fifty years — Bucky looked mostly okay. Himself. The vacant look gone. And sitting there, it landed on him like ordnance that he’d led a mission and rescued Bucky. Like a superhero in a comic book. He was smiling totally helplessly, like a loon himself.</p><p>Bucky, though, still appeared at a loss, only staring at him and slowly shaking his head.</p><p>“Yeah . . .” he said eventually, when Buck still hadn’t spoken.</p><p>“Why do you look like this?” Bucky asked in a soft, shaking voice. “Maybe you told me, but I can’t . . .”</p><p>“Yeah . . .” he repeated, at a genuine loss himself. “We can talk about it later.”</p><p>“Steve . . .” </p><p>But Bucky didn’t seem to know what to say. Didn’t even change the way he was failing to blink. </p><p>He smiled. Said softly, “It’s still me, Buck. Have no fear.”</p><p>But there was much going on in Bucky’s eyes. Of such intensity that it stumped him a little, a memory which in reading some of Bucky’s letters would return to trouble him — but at that moment in the aid tent, he took it for Bucky’s usual concern for him.</p><p>“You get your rest, Buck. Everything’s okay. I promise.”</p><p>“Captain.”</p><p>He grimaced. “Gotta go. Doc Frankenstein over there’s a little on the literal side. Promise I’ll see you soon.”</p><p>Bucky sighed as though released from a hold, though it was likely also breathlessness from traces of the serum still in his system, but nodded. Sank farther into the cot, head on the pillow and eyes on the ceiling, and just nodded.</p><p>It was the following day before they returned from their scouting mission. Formation of the unit still being weeks ahead during their furlough back to SSR HQ in London, it was apparent at that stage that Colonel Phillips had no idea what to do with him. Even though Peggy kept clearing her throat politely, waiting for Phillips to see the obvious. But Phillips had wanted an army of Super Soldiers, and got just one. And told him outright he didn’t consider him “officer material” fit to head a company — he was too hotheaded and didn’t follow instructions, apparently — so only thought to use him daily for the most dangerous missions.</p><p>The three of them standing inside Colonel Phillip’s regimental tent for that morning’s debriefing after the mission, the colonel unspooled a bit of his gripe once more. Peggy was meanwhile silently, visually checking every inch of him for physical integrity, as much as simply checking him out. Stomach tightening, feeling her brunette everything on him, he wondered when she was going to make her move. He sure as hell had no idea what to do. The most he’d managed so far was . . . a handful of slightly dirty dreams. He was pretty sure he’d need Bucky’s help . . . </p><p>“You’re dismissed, Captain Rogers,” Colonel Phillips said, on a raised voice and a drawn out sigh, breaking into his thoughts, making him realize he’d stopped looking at the colonel and was actually just staring at Peggy. Bringing his attention back to the colonel, he said, “Thank you, sir,” then looked straight down the camp toward the aid tent before looking back at Peggy. She tipped her head in the direction of the aid tent and mouthed, “Go.”</p><p>Up now and seated on the edge of the canvas cot, Buck’s now completely lucid eyes locked on him as he entered the tent. The blue Captain America jersey showing underneath his patched up leather jacket, shield slung across his back, he touched his brow as Bucky had done the night at the future-world Expo before Bucky’s deployment.</p><p>Bucky didn’t so much as blink. Bucky was eating, the cardboard box of the K-ration breakfast in danger of slipping from his fingers. Dropping the shield at the foot of the cot and locating and pulling up the ammo crate, he lowered himself to it, his knees on either side of Bucky’s left one, and relieved Sergeant Barnes of the cardboard box. Tossing it somewhere at their feet since it was empty anyway. </p><p>“Hiya, stranger,” he said.</p><p>But Bucky simply went right on staring. So intently that it left him slightly unnerved. But thankfully, Bucky finally spoke.</p><p>“What the fuck,” Bucky softly said, in a voice that was part wonder, part genuine question, his eyes on his body and not his face, and he laughed despite himself.</p><p>“Language there, Bucky Barnes,” he said, struggling mightily to control his happiness. </p><p>But Bucky wasn’t smiling. Not even looking sure of his own mind. His heart skipped. Had the doctor been wrong? Maybe Buck had lost— </p><p>“Buck,” he said in a small voice, controlling panic. “It’s me.”</p><p>“<i>You</i> th’ fuck <i>who?</i>” Bucky replied.</p><p>Like it was Brooklyn and they were being cornered by some shady salesman.</p><p>Unexpected as it was, it busted him right up, leaving him howling softly until there were tears of joy and relief in his eyes, causing him to look over his shoulder, sure that doc was on his way to throw him out.</p><p>It broke Bucky’s state of shock as well. Reaching for him, Bucky grabbed his shoulders, visibly trembling as he continued staring down at his body, before pulling him in and crushing him to his body. So tight he almost couldn’t breathe. But suddenly, wonderfully, all the world seemed made of Bucky’s arms and body around him, his breath on him. </p><p>“Steve,” Bucky gasped. “Steve— what the— what the <i>fuck . . .</i>” He said nothing, just buried his face in Bucky’s shoulder and hugged him back. He was trembling a little himself as his panic subsided, not realizing how deeply it had struck. What would he have done if Bucky had been wiped of his memory? Collapsed and woke up and didn’t know who he was. He clutched Bucky’s shirt, hoping Bucky wasn’t feeling his thudding heart, not wanting to come off as a newbie to war and falling apart at the first sign of trauma. Feeling his tightened hold, Bucky responded in kind.</p><p>With the noise and dust having settled, one thing remained, being the most urgent feeling existing between them, that they hadn’t seen each other in over a year. The longest by far they had ever been apart. Bucky really didn’t need explanations right then anyway, and really, what answers did he have. “Missed ya, Buck,” he said softly. Bucky crushed him harder. “H-how’d— how’d y’get here?” Bucky whispered fiercely. “Not on the Staten Island Ferry,” he whispered back, making Bucky laugh, however faintly, weakly.</p><p>When Bucky released him, it wasn’t much of a release. Hand still on his shoulder keeping him close, eyes still taking him in like he was written in a different language. “I thought I was dreaming the whole time,” Bucky continued, his strained voice sounding so different than he had ever heard throughout their lives. “I really thought I was. That you were here, and we’d walked days through— that you’d rescued me from— from that— hell. I thought—” Buck looked affected, blinking. “I wondered why I was having that kind of fantasy.”</p><p>He tried for a smile. “Wish fulfillment, maybe?” he offered. “That I’d finally repaid you for a lifetime of debt?”</p><p>Bucky’s brow tightened, followed by a clear warning look. “Don’t ever say anything like that again, Steve.”</p><p>He nodded, lowering his head. Then after a long gaze down at his own body, he looked up again with a lopsided smile. “Crazy, huh?”</p><p>Bucky’s gaze hadn’t shifted. Bucky was still looking. “That’s not the word.”</p><p>“Doc? We’re from Division S2.”</p><p>Both he and Bucky turned and looked at the entrance. “Guess that’s my cue,” he said, clasping his hands on his thighs and slowly getting up, feeling right as rain. “See ya soon, Buck. Yer men are clamoring for you, by the way, so hurry it up.”</p><p>As it happened, a select handful of sergeants from the breakout didn’t fully return to lead their platoons, Bucky included. Instead Peggy requested Division to release them for “special duties,” later handing him a list of names that included men even from other Allied armies from the breakout. She wasn’t British Intelligence for nothing, having investigated fuller details of the breakout, including who did what. </p><p>Handing him the list, she’d encouraged him to keep the names on it separated from the larger companies as much as possible and  to continually engage the men on there as a group.</p><p>“Buy them a lot of beers,” she said.</p><p>Not until that very morning, listening to the unit’s audio recordings, would he discover that she’d also encouraged her fellow Brit Pinky Pinkerton to likewise ensure that said list of men stayed physically close. “For purposes to be disclosed at a future date,” Pinky had quoted her on the audio. The result being that even before their London furlough, most of the future Howling Commandos had already become close working on everything from putting together their own maps and strategies to training together. With a completely unaware Colonel Phillips already sending them as a team on sporadic missions — recon, immediate action enemy movement disruption, that kind of thing.</p><p>It should have been all good, except that . . . Bucky, out of intensive care, back on his feet, and in spite of their heartfelt reconciliation . . . did not adjust well. To him.</p><p>Nothing could have prepared him for it. The day Bucky was discharged, temporarily assigned to light duties, much to his platoon’s dismay, he’d seen to Bucky’s transfer from aid station to the sergeants’ barracks where Bucky was housed, settling Bucky back into his room. There Bucky thanked him, and badly caught off guard by Bucky thanking him like he was a porter dropping off luggage at the front desk, he’d said said no problem, see ya soon, and left.</p><p>Soon enough, Bucky was back with his platoon, between their assignments for Phillips. But through it all, Bucky’s stilted attitude toward him remained. Almost helplessly so.</p><p>Bucky seemed to have gotten stuck and seemed unable to stop his speechless staring at him.</p><p>Decades later, he could see everything wrong with how he had handled the following weeks. Weeks of Bucky’s journey to acceptance, to use Natashas’s phrasing, of his transformation. It was just that — it had been so disconcerting and confusing for Bucky to be looking at him like a stranger, and so maybe on top of everything else he’d been impatient as well. That had been his reaction, a kind of impatience. Never mind that <i>disconcerting and confusing</i> might have been like trying to make a joke of what Bucky was feeling. But what else could he have expected. Back then he’d just been an idiot, as capable of handling complicated emotions as he would have been running a support group for bullies.</p><p>So he’d buried his feelings under humor, the sure-thing neighborhood and cultural language he knew he had with the one who had always been his North Star, but who was now leaving him adrift. Trying to convince himself on his own that it would all work out.</p><p>Regularly, he’d try breaking through by bringing up some joke from their childhood. At which Bucky would only look concerned and a little fascinated that this stranger knew jokes and memories from <i>his life.</i> Well, that didn’t help matters, dissolving him into laughter. Because ultimately, Buck was Buck and he was Steve — so, often he’d say, “Buck, hey, remember the time when . . .” then stop, watching as Bucky turned a casual look over his shoulder at him, sweeping a look up, then down his body, and then simply wait for him to finish. As if waiting for an imposter who, when grabbed, would admit to having taken over the identity of his childhood friend Steve Rogers, and with enough pressure applied, would show just where Steve was being held.</p><p>No amount of sensitivity training could have saved him from how much that made him laugh. Better than feeling the hard knot in his stomach, he supposed.</p><p>Not that it had been uncomfortable by any means. Far from it. But it caused slight friction in the budding unit. Fruitlessly, he tried to explain to Dugan, Gabe, Jackie, all of them, why Bucky was acting so stilted toward him — <i>“Why’s he on the team? We get he’s your pal and all . . .”</i> — explaining how it used to be for Bucky with a very different him, a very sickly him, and how Bucky’s reaction was to be given leeway and not taken at face value. But after much gaze averting and shrugging from the others, he’d just given up. Honestly, it had dismayed him that in bonding as a team, Bucky would prove the most unsure element, because of him.</p><p>But Pinky seemed to have gotten it.</p><p>“He seems quite lovely,” Pinky said one morning while cleaning dismantled weapons, nodding at Bucky, his British accent making it sound even lovelier. “Until he’s poked on this matter, of course. And then you see quite a different look to him.”</p><p>“It’s a transition,” he assured him, repeating the platitudes he’d been deploying to fall asleep at night. “It can’t be easy for him.” Then mostly for himself, “He’ll get there.”</p><p>No one could have wished it more intensely than him. How could Bucky, who knew him better than he knew himself, now suddenly have a problem <i>seeing</i> him, past an outer shell. Bucky wasn’t shallow. Their bond certainly not. Why then did it matter what he looked like? He could have transformed into a girl before Bucky’s eyes and Bucky still shouldn’t have had a problem <i>seeing</i> him. His mental strength never more tested, he’d said “Buck, it’s me,” enough times to make himself hoarse.</p><p>The situation was made all the more frustrating because for him, nothing had changed. His transformation had been purely physical. </p><p>Past his mind and senses being supersonically fired, and his body feeling like a battering ram. Past the actual astonishing feats of physical transformation, there hadn’t really been that much more to remark on. In fact, the physical part proved the hardest for him; getting a handle on how his new body worked, seeing as physical coordination, not exactly his hallmark pre-serum, didn’t come naturally to him. But once he’d gotten the hang of not crashing into walls turning corners — or at least at exerting more control over how he did it — he’d only ever felt that at last, by a miracle of science, his body and his mind were finally aligned. After that, the rest was just a job needing reporting to each morning, without the irritation of anyone asking whether he’d lost his way to the infirmary.</p><p>That Bucky seemed stuck on the physical . . . </p><p>It hurt. Underneath all his laughing, it hurt a little. They were together in a war, together in the regiment of their heritage, everyone’s highest dream during recruitment, yet it seemed they were farther apart than if he had remained in Brooklyn.</p><p>“Bucky,” called Pinky one morning, neatly taping down wires for explosives. Jackie was teaching them to assist with prep. “Steve says you two once raided a gin joint storeroom by convincing the proprietor that Steve’s sinusitis, caused by his formerly deviated septum, required copious amounts of <i>liquor</i> as a balm. I can’t imagine how on earth you could have pulled that off. Scrawny looking or not.”</p><p>From his table at the outdoor shooting range, where Bucky was cleaning weapons, Bucky sent across another one of this guarded looks. But Bucky was smiling, because the memory was legitimately tops. “Steve has the mind of an enterprising bootlegger to begin with. Don’t let the pristine new look fool you.”</p><p>“You mean to say, therefore, that <i>this</i> version of Steve is <i>less</i> dangerous than his prior, more unassuming incarnation?”</p><p>Buck’s smile tightened, trying to stay on, as Bucky returned to his task. “That remains to be seen.”</p><p>Holding wires separately, because he now had a perfectly steady grip, he glanced gratefully at Pinky, recognizing what the former Red Devil was trying to do for them.</p><p>Finally, Peggy’s efforts paid off. Months later in London, having gotten over his myriad prejudices against him, Colonel Phillips met him and Peggy on the same page in assigning him a strike unit. They were now officially a team, with Agent Peggy Carter of MI5 as their advisor. Peg hadn’t gloated; Phillips, she explained, was never a man to be rushed.</p><p>Indeed. Because even after commissioning the unit with the specific mission of destroying all of Hydra’s installations, Colonel Phillips instructed them to avoid direct enemy engagement and focus only on disruption without showing themselves. Peggy had subtly shaken her head at him when he’d taken a breath to launch into how that didn’t make sense. Which had later saved him an apology, since Phillips had only delayed to get them approval for artillery and air support if and when needed. Phillips merely hadn’t felt the need to share his activities with the one random Super Soldier.</p><p>So on assignment after assignment, by sheer force of being together again, he and Bucky ground toward finding a space to be themselves with each other again. Like a massive mound of earth needing gradual shifting back into place — Bucky slowly fell back to being Bucky towards him again. More and more leaving his stressed demeanor behind. The missions ultimately demanded it. Soon enough they seemed there again, eating and drinking and horsing around with everyone else in the unit — what a riot it had been to discover that he couldn’t get drunk — and together at every free moment, carrying on like no time had passed. He’d been blown away at Bucky’s skills at marksmanship, making Bucky laugh by telling him they were taking a rifle back to Brooklyn and going looking for that one jerk in that one alley. </p><p>Whenever he couldn’t score an opening to hang around Peggy, he was with Bucky. In no time the entire regiment knew them to be inseparable . . . long after their own unit had come to see and accept it for themselves.</p><p>Yet sometimes in quiet moments, he would see from the corner of his eye Bucky stealing long looks at his body. Watching him walk, stand, train the men in hand to hand combat. Watch him perform even the simple act of getting into bed and lying down.</p><p>And . . . he would be lying if he denied noticing how Bucky didn’t seem all too keen on actual physical closeness between them. Especially missed after that big, warm hug Bucky had given him in the aid station. </p><p>But if his body so much as brushed Bucky’s, Bucky would pull back almost imperceptibly, but he ’percepted it all right.</p><p>Then at times, if they were alone, falling silent, Bucky would eventually ask, “Do you feel . . . different?”</p><p>“I’m still me, Buck,” he would assure him, and Bucky would nod, steal a couple more looks at him, before looking away.</p><p>It was a crevice jump that did it. </p><p>—</p><p>There was a dumpster-sized boulder against his back as he spoke, behind which was a crevice about a hundred meters deep. Colonel Phillips had finally gotten approval for the unit to call for support when needed and they had graduated from disruption to engagement. </p><p>Having located an installation spread across two neighboring towns Hydra was using to manufacture components — one of the sits he’d seen on the map at the prison — he was imparting instructions to each member of the team in prep for a series of dry run assaults. Finished, he told them he was up for a last minute recon and would be back in a sec, and simply turned and dropped into the crevice. Except, it must have looked like dropping right off the face of the earth because as long as he lived, he would never forget the audible intake of Bucky sucking all the air from the world, before releasing the wildest yell he had ever heard in his life. Dropping to the floor of the natural chamber, he’d sent a look upward, readying to catch a falling comrade. Instead all he had seen was Bucky’s stricken face against the black night farther up, the whites of Bucky’s eyes tearing down at him as hard and still as the rest of him.</p><p>That night in camp, well, it had been complete insanity from laughter. Everyone had been destroyed over it, Dugan and Dernier enacting a pantomime until Bucky’s howl became the default response to anything anyone tried to do for the next several days. Buck, born with a shamelessness gene same as him, had happily accepted the ribbing and barbs, even offering corrections to the narrative. </p><p>It incident broke every last bit of encrusted worry in the unit. </p><p>And somehow accomplished what just trying to be himself with Bucky hadn’t.</p><p>Early the next morning, Bucky sat with Gabe checking weapons. When Gabe left, he watched as Bucky sat there staring up at the craggy mountainside at the foot of which they’d set up camp. Then Bucky lowered his head and began running his hand through his hair and clutching it . . . looking worried in a way he completely recognized. Like he’d done something dumb again and frustrated Bucky to the point of Bucky not only having to scold him, but requiring that Bucky compose a full-on lecture to do so. Shamelessly, it sent his heart into a free-fall of happiness.</p><p>Here was Bucky, at last. And he wasn’t surprised at all when Bucky showed up shortly after to talk.</p><p>Bucky came and sat with him on the very boulder he’d dropped from. Wanting to sit opposite him, Bucky instead began hesitating in the process of sitting down, apparently trying to find a position that wouldn’t involve interspacing their legs and knees, looking around their feet as though more space laid hidden somewhere he could access, while he watched the whole thing wondering whether Bucky had lost his mind.</p><p>“Buck,” he said sharply, making Bucky look up, casting an apologetic look at him before slowly taking a seat. And he, map held aloft while he’d been waiting for Bucky to settle, set the map down on Bucky’s knee.</p><p>Gazing down into the ravine, Bucky had a perplexed look on his face. It was a long time before Bucky spoke. “I guess you don’t need me anymore.”</p><p>When he finally understood what Bucky had just said, which did take him a while, he felt his expression crumple like he’d been punched really hard in the face. “This from the guy who almost murdered me for saying—”</p><p>“It’s not the same thing.”</p><p>And he could see that for Bucky it really wasn’t.</p><p>But he had no answer. He had no idea what to even think. So he just said the only thing he knew. “Buck,” he said, pointing toward the ridge above them separating them from the towns. “I’m here to pick the biggest fight with the biggest bullies this side of the Atlantic. They got whole squads of ‘em here, not just one or two. Plus whole <i>valleys,</i> not just alleys to fight ‘em in. I could be here years and never run outta jerks to punch. And you’re gonna sit this one out?”</p><p>Bucky’s smile had been pulling since he’d started talking. But when he finished Bucky turned serious, tipped him a look. “There you are,” Bucky quietly said.</p><p>Bucky it seemed as of that morning, had committed to accepting the new him. </p><p>And he proceeded to have the time of his life breaking Bucky’s brain.</p><p>That very night they executed their raid on the factory towns. Following conclusion of very brief but effective close quarters combat, Bucky was speechless. Standing there staring down at the knocked out Hydra guard units. “I don’t believe it,” Bucky said. “I <i>am</i> living in a fantasy. Yours.” “Can’t wait to get back to Brooklyn, huh,” he said, taking off after a truck crunching into gear trying to flee the factory. “I’m not letting you back into Brooklyn,” Bucky called to his departing figure. “No way.”</p><p>Calling out orders and about to run ahead into enemy buildings, if Bucky wasn’t looking at him at the time, Bucky would spin around, about to shout, <i>“Steve, no!”</i> a second before his brain refreshed on seeing his new body and caught the words before they blew out of him.</p><p>Running into a hail of bullets, he heard Bucky swearing viciously, throwing grenade after grenade at their three o’clock for cover while trying to keep up behind him.</p><p>Two days later it was running straight through a burning, collapsing building to cut off an escaping contingent on the other side, running straight into the path of their truck and breaking their engine block with his shield, only to find out that his utility belt, or something in it, was on fire.</p><p>Frozen, in the second before he could think to tear it off, he was suddenly hit with a sandbag which exploded against his chest, dousing him, head to foot, in sand. Stunned, he just stood there, eyes closed. Then howls of laughter erupted a short distance in front of him. </p><p>Shaking the gritty particles from his hair and face, he opened his eyes to see Bucky bent over, hands on knees and rifle slung to his back, panting. Next to Bucky was a deserted position which had been secured by sandbags, on the other next to Bucky was Gabe, falling to his knees, laughing so hard he had the heel of his hand pressed to his eye. Dum Dum was grinning, instructing Sawyer and the rest of the unit to round up the enemy from the busted truck.</p><p>“Steve,” Gabe cried, clutching Bucky’s rifle strap in trying to keep himself upright. “You are merciless!”</p><p>“I’m so glad there are witnesses now,” Bucky sighed, head turned to Gabe, which was pointless because Gabe was flat on the ground, clutching his stomach and howling at the wind.</p><p>Then on short furlough in Lisbon, he got into it with a bunch of rowdy Australian soldiers. But that, Bucky wasn’t having.</p><p>The rest of the unit remaining at their table and keeping their distance, Bucky had cordoned him off, arm against his chest having pushed him into a corner behind the bar and went ahead and had himself a mini meltdown. It was the kind of talking to he hadn’t received since the back of the diner incident at home. “It’s like Brooklyn all over again with these guys,” he declared to Bucky’s grim face.</p><p>“<i>Yeah,</i> Steve,” Bucky said, caustically, blocking him with his whole body now and stopping him from a world of stupidity. “Yeah — except you can kill now, so <i>no!</i> <i>Not</i> like home. Street bullies are <i>no</i> longer your priority, Steve, I’m <i>calling</i> it now. You hear me? You go near them and so help me, I will clock you. Broken bones or not. These types of people <i>no longer</i> qualify in your top ten things to destroy. You <i>won,</i> Steve. You get that? So maybe start learning to use your <i>words</i> instead.”</p><p>Frowning begrudgingly at Bucky, Buck had ignored him. Turning away instead with a hand clutched at his hair. “You’re driving me <i>crazy!</i>” Bucky then released a breath and went around to the front of the bar. There Bucky whispered to the bartender, sending a thumb over his shoulder at the rowdy table, at which the bartender nodded and went over.</p><p>Returning to their own table, Gabe and Dernier were nodding understandingly and waving Bucky over, with Dugan pushing a host of whiskey shots at Bucky. The unit’s entire order, clustered in the center around their beer glasses. All of which Bucky grabbed one by one and threw back fast and hard enough that he was genuinely startled. He blinked at Bucky. </p><p>“For real.” Bucky had bent his head, shaking it. “How the fuck am I not an alcoholic already here,” he said, sounding more Brooklyn than he had since they’d met up again. “My life, right here, as war.”</p><p>“You’re not alone,” Dugan said, pushing him more whiskey. “War’s brought a lot of things about life— uh,” Dugan laughed. “Well . . . home.”</p><p>He smirked, not at all feeling sorry, only watching the Australians being mouthy to the bartender. Well talk was free. But if they put their hands on the waitress again he was going over there and Bucky could go ahead and kill him.</p><p>Still, feeling bad about his behavior and wanting to make it up to Bucky, including to show his appreciation for the effort Buck was making at adjusting, he went on a quick scouting mission to locate a nearby lake he’d seen on a map. Sure enough, there it was, small and beautiful, surrounded by lush greenery. Returning, he loaded up the unit in a deuce, they hiked the last few yards through the brush, and coming upon the hidden gem, he told them all to enjoy.</p><p>It was fantastic, refreshing, a small pier providing a spot to lie down in the warm air. Soon however, it got to diving and how long any of them could hold their breaths. </p><p>By then he’d already discovered he could do it for quite a long time. Everyone else horsed, dove, while they kept him for last. Then they all wagered.</p><p>“How long, Steve,” Morita asked. “Just an estimate.”</p><p>But he just smiled and shook his head modestly. </p><p>“Put in your bet, soldier, or get out of the wager,” Monty insisted. Morita slapped crumpled bills into Monty’s waiting hand.</p><p>“Bucky?” asked Dugan, glancing at where Bucky was seated against one of the pier’s wooden posts, head back, eyes closed.</p><p>“Steve, just please be careful.”</p><p>There were growls of dismissal, and at the signal, he dove into the water.</p><p>When he hadn’t come up after ten minutes, he saw the stomping along the pier and began hearing the faint vibrations of shouts and arguments. He was pretty sure he could stay under for nearly an hour, which had been about the time he’d taken on a particular mission for Colonel Phillips, and was frankly very much enjoying this aspect of his new body. He’d always liked a good swim.</p><p>About to emerge nonetheless, he then heard Bucky’s raised voice, arguing and yelling with someone — and stayed put; next thing, Bucky had dived in, searching frantically this way and that, only to turn and find him a short distance away, waving and blissfully smiling at him like a mermaid.</p><p>He’d been sure Bucky would come over and strangle him. Instead a strange thing happened. </p><p>For long nearly fantasy-like moments, Bucky simply stared at him under the greenish water, slowly moving his arms to hold his place. Looking spellbound at him with long, slow blinks. As though they were suddenly suspended in time together, and Bucky was actually seeing a mermaid. Then Bucky kicked up to the surface.</p><p>Surfacing after him, he watched as Bucky dragged himself back up onto the pier, pushing his soaking hair off his forehead and tilting his head back at the sky. “Why do I bother,” Bucky gasped, taking the laughter and hard pats on his back without a word while Gabe collected his winnings.</p><p>“Seems the sickly kid from Brooklyn really does no longer need your protection, Bucky,” Dugan said, prepping to sun himself on the pier.</p><p>“Yeah,” Gabe said, pausing in counting his winnings to put a fist to his heart. “But you can’t just say it, Bucky, you gotta <i>feel</i> it.”</p><p>He swam over to where Bucky was, still disorientated by the moment in the water. Folding his arms on the pier next to Bucky, he sent a look up, but saw no indication that Bucky had experienced anything out of the ordinary with him.</p><p>“You thought you saw an alleyway down there, didn’t you,” he said, smiling serenely up at him. So happy to be alive, whole, and with Bucky, he could have been in hell and have floated. “You’ll always be my hero,” he told him. Bucky only sighed, sending a long-suffering, sideways look at him. Smiling blissfully, he indeed floated away from the pier. </p><p>But that seemed to have cinched it. After that lake incident, Bucky did seem to feel it.</p><p>His changes — his new body. His height, his breadth, his arms, legs, thighs, shoulders, the size of his feet, the expanse of his chest and the narrowness of his waist. The posture of his spine. His capacity to take a deep breath and have it feel that he was indeed inhaling all the air in the world. All were now Bucky’s to experience no less. </p><p>It gave him enormous pleasure that they could now discuss it, explore it. The mechanics of it, how injuries appeared to work and heal on him. That Bucky touched and grabbed and held him freely as Bucky had throughout their lives. Once again, he felt Bucky’s hands on him in a natural, unforced, unstilted manner. And as it had always done, it calmed his heart.</p><p>Maybe there was something about jumping into water that was altogether different . . . </p><p>He didn’t know, only too relieved it was over and that Bucky’s acceptance of his new body had somehow been cemented. It would have devastated him — never mind the irony, or the mockery it would have made of their friendship — if his physical appearance had ended up being what drove him and Bucky apart.</p><p>Even better, he got to see the moment when Bucky acknowledged, and finally let that part of their lives go.</p><p>Not for seventy years, exploring his own memories as a more self-aware person, would he realize what a seismic shift that had been for Bucky — Bucky who had known him since rescuing him at the age of six when he’d started first grade and spent his first lunch hour getting his face rearranged by some older kid. Until Bucky Barnes, <i>second</i> grader, had sauntered over and grabbed the bully by the hair, pulling the kid’s head back and yelling into his face to <i>Never fucking try it again!</i> Bucky who had only ever known him attached to a constant frisson of worry in his heart. Now to see him, and not have to worry . . . </p><p>The night it happened, the unit had hooked up with the rest of the regiment, first clearing the area outside of Lucca of any enemy hideouts while the regiment re-camped in a field outside the two. It was supposed to have ended there. The regiment settled, awaiting further orders for deployment. Instead, at dawn, a barrage of rocket attacks descended on them from the other side of the city. Suddenly the entire regiment was in an engagement. It had been brutal, hard and fast, lasting all day to dusk.</p><p>Seeing as they’d scouted the area themselves, so there shouldn’t have been so much as an enemy gnat in the area, at the first whistle of incoming he’d assembled the unit and took them straight through the city for the source. They found none other than Hydra Division, emblemed vehicles and mobile stations, apparently quickly rolled in as soon as the regiment was camped for the express purpose of testing new forms of rocketry. He’d sent Sawyer as a runner, since they carrier no radio, to inform the regiment of a counterassault needed.</p><p>Meantime, they had caused the Hydra contingent a living hell. By the time a company arrived, Sawyer moments ahead, charging over to slam up against a tank next to him and point behind him at support coming, they were ready to emerge from their positions and execute a full on assault. He yelled at the unit to follow him and launched himself over the hood of the truck, racing straight for the first mobile unit and sending it slamming into the next two.</p><p>That night the regiment was secure once more in its field camp, unmolested by the enemy. </p><p>Casualties were over a hundred, medics running up and down the lines — the wounded laid out over the grassy fields around camp, the tired collapsed face down next to them. Morita secured the unit’s shelter for the night while Colonel Phillips came by and congratulated the regiment as well as the unit. Peggy Carter was in England, on a mission for MI5.</p><p>All this he and Bucky heard second hand, as night having fallen before the entirety of the regiment had straggled back and were being tended to, they’d gone ahead and found a quiet place to tend to his wounds. Their luxurious find had been the shadow side of a derelict barn, being where the private found them to update. Thanking the private, they’d started on his tending-to. He never used medics, not needing them, insisting even when Colonel Phillips had wanted regular medical checkups on him as part of approving the unit. Besides balking at the thought of going back to a life like that, he’d argued they couldn’t spare medics for it anyway. He only needed Bucky. He’d assured Phillips Bucky knew what to do.</p><p>So away from the massive noise and clatter, Buck brought up the Red Cross box sourced for him, Buck had said, by Pinky, and containing items from the unit’s individual aid kits. Setting the box on the crate between his thighs, Buck sat facing him. Having the larger body now, he sat with his back against the barn wall, his knees up on either side of Bucky and the crate, holding still while Bucky cleaned up his busted face. At the tail end of things there, a couple of exploded rockets had sent him face first into an outcropping of rock. The result was a mess.</p><p>Ambient light from the dark night around them seeming enough, Bucky was working in silence. Background, in a distance that seemed both far and present, they listened to the sounds of hundreds of men after a protracted battle. Cries, wails, moans — sustained as though from a host of ghouls. The sounds were chilling. Bearable only from an awareness that war made no room for self-pity, only inevitability. Next battle, it might be them, and the best they could do was to not think too much about it.</p><p>They’d washed his face and eyes. Bucky had tipped nitrite onto a piece of cloth and made him inhale. No idea whether he’d been exposed to gas, but Buck said as long as it was Hydra and it was rockets, he should. So he had. But mostly, it was the second degree burns.</p><p>In preparation of applying a sulfa paste, Buck was using thick gauze to carefully soak off blood. The damage was bad. By morning his healing process would have begun handling the worst of it, but at least in absorbing the extra love and medicinal goodness, it wouldn’t look hideous while doing so. Using medication to smooth over the healing process had been Buck’s innovation, although he assured Bucky it couldn’t possibly work without the first part.</p><p>While Bucky dabbed and gently swiped at his face, purple, blue and deeply cut, the noise around them seemed to quietly diminish, forming a steady, distant din instead. He couldn’t even tell if it was actual, or just the feeling. Around them, stars winked, the hard, vicious sounds of deuces on the road to Lucca ground, and yellow fires from the city in the background glowed. Like a Renaissance painting, Buck had mentioned, staring briefly at the distant burning Lucca, while he’d made expressions in the dark Bucky thankfully couldn’t see. But light, noise and darkness, soon enough blended. Bucky’s slow, long touches on his skin felt like a serenade.</p><p>“Every time I do this,” Bucky said quietly. “I run through the next steps. Bruises, cuts and scrapes, cleaned and medicated . . .  So boil the water, close the windows . . .  get the hot water bottle out, make sure the blankets are also out. Tell Mrs. R it’s okay, I got him lying down . . . cough medicine, chicken soup, nebulizer, little Lottie Schumaker on standby to make a fast run to Doc Hollister in case things take a turn. All the contingencies. Waiting to see what getting your face kicked in triggers this time.”</p><p>“Asthma attacks were always a safe bet.”</p><p>“Heart palpitations . . .” Bucky continued in the same monotone. “Chest cold, that scary persistent cough, your blood pressure spiking . . . and yes, the mother of it all, that fucking asthma.”</p><p>“Yeah, I don’t miss the asthma.”</p><p>Bucky sighed, lowering and shaking his head, slowly searching through the box and extracting the sulfa, a small bottle of purified water, a wooden applicator. “I can’t tell you how much I don’t miss any of it. I can hardly believe you’re free of it all.”</p><p>A sudden banging and clambering, and their quiet was broken as a soldier cantered past the side of the barn. Stopped, the soldier stared wide eyed at them.</p><p>“You a medic?” he squeaked.</p><p>Both he and Bucky had turned and were looking at the kid, who looked from Bucky to him then back to Bucky, and began stammering an apology. The soldier was clearly in the throes of early traumatization.</p><p>“What’s your name, private,” Bucky asked, as they were taught to do. The private yelped it. Bucky nodded, spoke in a calmly soothing voice. “Find your platoon sergeant, Private Marling. He’ll see to the problem.”</p><p>“Yes, sir!” the private cried, and scrambled away. They returned to their task.</p><p>“Here to take <i>my</i> platoon sergeant,” he whispered. “I don’t think so.”</p><p>Bucky chuckled, in the process of making the sulfa paste. Pouring water into the small plastic container, Bucky picked up the flat wooden applicator, which reminded him of an ice cream stick, and stirred in his slow, deliberate manner. Then Bucky scooped up a quantity of the antibacterial paste and slowly, began spackling him back to one piece.</p><p>“You know, at this point you should just get certified,” he told him quietly.</p><p>“Are you thinking of retiring?”</p><p>He creased his brow. “No . . .”</p><p>“So if I did that, went and got a medic’s cert, complete with a slew of soldiers to continually patch up, when would I have time to take care of you?”</p><p>He smiled at Bucky. </p><p>“And there it is, folks,” Bucky said, softly brushing sulfa across his left brow. “No magical experiment has changed Steve Rogers.”</p><p>“Or Bucky Barnes,” he answered. </p><p>“Or Bucky Barnes,” Buck agreed. “Now please hold still.” Then after a moment, Bucky asked, “Does this hurt anymore, with everything . . .” Bucky trailed off, not knowing the word.</p><p>“Enhanced.”</p><p>“Enhanced . . . like this. It doesn’t hurt anymore, does it?”</p><p>“Has it ever? You know I don't care about getting beat up. I care about beating <i>them</i> up.”</p><p>Bucky snorted, laughing under his breath. Sifting through the aid kit, Bucky snorted again. </p><p>“What,” he asked.</p><p>“Pinky threw in some chap stick lip balm.”</p><p>“The Army threw that in,” he corrected. “But it’s a good call, cause I’m not getting sulfa on my mouth. So you keep track of that.”</p><p>Bucky smiled, setting aside the stick of balm as he found the second packet of sulfa he was looking for. He waited for Bucky to extract that and set it aside also before continuing. </p><p>“But no, it doesn’t hurt. I guess with enhanced strength comes invulnerability. Makes sense I guess.”</p><p>Bucky now swabbed the right side of his face, dropping the gauze to the ground on the pile accumulated there, before resuming. “Does . . . anything else feel different?”</p><p>“Lots of things.”</p><p>“I mean like . . .”</p><p>Another extended silence, and he slowly said, “Like when I get a hard-on?”</p><p>They laughed softly together into the darkness.</p><p>“Yeh,” he said.</p><p>Bucky paused. “Yeah?”</p><p>He nodded. “Remember now, I was on tour for over a year, all over the country, all by ma’ lonesome. Took that side of things out for a spin.”</p><p>Bucky was quietly dying with laughter. “You couldn’t have. You couldn’t manage it.”</p><p>He shrugged. “Didn’t have to try.”</p><p>“Mmm,” Buck said. “Just raining pussy, huh?”</p><p>“Now, Sergeant,” he said reproachfully.</p><p>Bucky was still laughing. “Didn’t you declare when you turned twenty-one that you were done with the whole thing.”</p><p>“The talk of the defeated.”</p><p>Bucky just shook his head, his smile pulling on his mouth. “No one has deserved any of this more than you.”</p><p>“There is a God,” he confirmed.</p><p>“What is that, makeup you're putting on him?” Sawyer was suddenly there and asking, peering at them in the dark.</p><p>“Yeah,” Bucky answered without skipping a beat. “And you shouldn't be backstage.” </p><p>Sawyer crashed down beside him, back against the side of the barn, before reaching forward between their knees and neatly depositing a couple bottles of local wine. </p><p>“Oh, man,” Bucky said appreciatively, looking at the bottles.</p><p>“Who loves ya,” Sawyer drawled.</p><p>“Me,” he said. “<i>I</i> love Bucky.”</p><p>“Well,” said Sawyer, standing back up to continue his rounds of dispensing bottled cheer. “I can believe that, cause no medic's gonna give you that light touch. Seal it with a kiss from the rest of us, Bucky. He was marvelous today.”</p><p>“Will do.”</p><p>Then Bucky was leaning around the corner of the barn. “Hey, Sawyer! Make sure to tell Morita to scrounge up extra chow! Lots of it! Tell Gabe and Jackie they can have the beds, Steve and I will sleep on the floor. And forget the blankets, Steve doesn’t need them — just make sure to get that extra chow!”</p><p>Bucky brought his attention back to him, shaking his head. “He’ll eat that damn extra food and bring the goddamn blankets. I swear he does it on purpose.”</p><p>“What were you saying all those months back,” he asked him, blinking slowly, carefully under his swollen brow. “That I didn’t need you anymore or something.”</p><p>Bucky didn’t say anything, shaking out sulfa and not even raising his eyes to him.</p><p>But it was a beautiful thing to see. The moment Bucky Barnes finally understood where he fit again into Steve Rogers’ life — right back in the place he had never left.</p><p>Heavy silence having fallen, Bucky tentatively brought up his gaze as it continued. And he smiled and blinked softly at Bucky, like a dame, slowly batting his busted lashes. Bucky laughed himself to near tears. Blushing in the dark. Dark, but he saw it.</p><p>It was Peggy, on a date with him weeks later, who astutely said, “Your relationship with Sergeant Barnes is . . . quite remarkable.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said mindlessly.</p><p>They’d dated a few times by now, ever since his USO tour had gate-crashed the 107th’s recovery from their unexpected engagement with Hydra. Though with him preoccupied with getting the unit functionally on its feet, plus being generally incapable around her anyway, he wasn’t sure whether to rightly consider their previous connections valid counts. And heaven knew he’d prepared. But with her being up at regiment most of the time, when she wasn’t overseas working for British Intelligence, he was lucky when she was around at all. Possibly being the problem. Maybe it all built up too much and turned into a scrambled pool when she did have time for him. </p><p>For instance, while he was perfectly capable of thinking more than several things at once, whenever with her, like now, he could only manage one. She was, without question, the most anything he had ever laid eyes on. And tonight, he was . . . hopeful. But as always, her eyes were moving over his face, missing nothing. “Yeah,” he repeated, answering her question, he hoped. “Buck’s the greatest.”</p><p>“Your eyes unfocus when you talk about him,” she said, suppressing a smile.</p><p>“They’re unfocused because I’m looking at you,” he said truthfully. </p><p>“Well,” she said. “He might just be standing directly behind me.”</p><p>He smiled dopily at her.</p><p>Her lips twisted as her smile came through. “All right, Captain Rogers,” she said. “Noted.” And after a pause, “Pinky seems to have developed a slight thing for him.”</p><p>“Well, Pinky would have to go back to Brooklyn and fill out an application. And grease some palms while he’s at it, ‘cuz last I heard, there is a backlog.”</p><p>She laughed delightedly, briefly, as was her way, looking at him like he was the coolest, most interesting guy she had ever met.</p><p>Every enhanced inch of him began reporting for duty.</p><p><i>“I don’t know what to do or say when I’m with her,</i> he’d whispered to Bucky. <i>“The way she looks at you? Just shower and show up.” “I think I’m gonna need more than that.” “Well, don’t talk too much or try to impress her. And don’t smile too much either.” “No? I thought my smile was my best attribute.” “You look like a virgin when you smile. Don’t do that with her.”</i> Then Bucky raised his head, falling silent, thoughtful. <i>“Do that with her,”</i> he amended.</p><p>So now he held her eyes and smiled at her. And she flushed, her lips softly parting.</p><p>The following morning, being when he returned to the unit’s assigned barracks, he let Bucky feed him a big replenishing breakfast. Buck just ate, smiled, and eventually said, “I’m surprised she left you in one piece.”</p><p>“You’re the greatest, Bucky,” he told him. “She—”</p><p>“Shh,” Buck said. “You never talk about it after.” And they grinned into their morning chow.</p><p>And then one day, like any other, they received strong enough intel to raid a Hydra moving factory hidden on a speeding train. A mission like any other.</p><p>But that memory, he absolutely did not revisit. No exceptions.</p><p>—</p><p>
  <i>Becca, <span class="u">Steve</span> is here with me. Of course he didn’t listen. But - it’s more than that - it’s unbelievable. In fact it’s fair to say I have a whole new appreciation for the word. So far I’ve been attempting to dislodge my shock by applying the Army’s scientifically proven method of shaking my head very hard. But he’s still here. And - while I laugh with emotions I can’t explain or really even understand - looking very different. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know being Stateside. But the ‘transformation’ (we’re not allowed to discuss it whatsoever) is really something. I wish I could tell you more about it. But even here I can’t. Or maybe I just don’t have the words. What I can tell you is that with what has happened to Steve, the world can no longer be the same. I can also assure you that I have neither the qualifications nor the life experience to tell you what that means. This is all I can manage for now, as I only just received a discharge from the aid station and am only now back in barracks - a whole other story for a whole other day. I’ll write again soon, I promise. Say hi to Brooklyn for me. I’ve missed her. And I love you. Bucky.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>First impressions, I suppose. Methodically is how we’re trained to deal with shock. So, methodically. How strange to raise my gaze upward at six feet and an inch or two in combat boots and not <span class="u">downward</span> to be looking into his eyes. Mind hasn’t stopped reeling. And probably won’t stop any time soon. Second, and I think most important - he dreams of bringing his neighborhood enemies to heel, for the hell of a life they put him through because he didn’t look like the rest of us. Now with a physical presence beyond the dreams of even the most ambitious of us, he delights at the thought of returning home for some light vengeance. I reacted poorly to this. There was no need. Words seldom change much of anyone’s experience. Experience alone does that. If we live to return home, he won’t need me pointing out that corner guys are sky to earth distances beneath him now. As they ever have been. I repeat the proposition - but I don’t think Steve even hears. Has any living soul had to experience the things I am? I keep laughing because what else can I do. That all of this is during a conflict of this magnitude does put things into perspective, but it is nonetheless a very large object in the landscape. That’s really all I can put together for now. I have a worry, but perhaps it’s better to wait and see on that one. Expect my next letter a little late - the new unit I told you about is getting some form of upgrade and it appears it will require some additional training. I’ll write soon. Love always, Bucky.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Sorry it’s taken so long to write. Between recuperating, the new unit, and caring for all the baby boys I’ve been charged with by the ma’s and pa’s of New York’s storied boroughs, it’s a wonder I have time at all to write. Nineteen and twenty year olds meant only for chasing broads in ice cream parlors, fighting in a world war. I wouldn’t wish it on those I hate the most. But I know what you want is to hear about Steve. ‘Well,’ is my current response. Partly also my delay in writing. Meant to gather my thoughts before any further letters. But it’s useless. I’m at a loss and definitely not myself. I do give myself plenty of leeway - but I don’t think I’ve ever looked so hard and so long at the form of another person. The way he moves, the things he’s capable of. It’s Steve, absolutely. But I have never met this person.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The worry I have is this - that this transformation has somehow changed him. Steve comes by and I find myself looking closely at his features. Looking for all I recognize. Then he starts speaking and I’m comforted because I know it’s Steve, no matter what - and the problem actually is that I continually fall into a pit of worry. That somehow it must have changed him deeply. How could it not. Changed him in a way that - I couldn’t cope with. That’s forever my concern, that Steve stay Steve. Did I tell you, when he broke us out of Hydra’s detention I asked him whether the transformation was permanent. ‘So far,’ he replied, as easily as strolling down to the corner shop. So when I wake early mornings or can’t fall asleep nights, worried a manifestation of this change I dread will come.. that on waking I’ll finally find everything different between us.. that it’s only a matter of time.. ‘So far,’ is all the comfort I have. Not much comfort, I’m sure you’ll agree. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>Becca, I’m sorry, I know it’s been a while. Remember the unit being put together to tackle the enemy? Looks like it’ll be successful, already is, if you ask me, and taking up all our spare time. I’m proud to have been chosen for it. Do I have to mention Steve is running it? Probably not.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>I can’t tell you where we are right now, only that the enemy is screwed. Steve is a force of nature. I know by now I should be used to seeing him not only in that uniform they’ve given him but as Captain America in general. But all I see is Steve. And in spite of my trepidation, it’s wonderful, heartwarming.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>And I here I am, even longer still between letters. And forgive me, I can only manage a quick update as things are heated at the moment. Well, as you know I was worried about the effect Steve’s transformation would have on him. Turns out I was just wasting my days and nights. Lesson hard-won courtesy of Steve and a pond of water. Still as wild, still as unstoppable. Still Steve.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Steve didn’t change, but a fundamental - alteration, I’ll call it - has taken place nonetheless. Don’t laugh or wonder that it’s taken me many months to grasp something I might have been able to simply assume. Fundamental changes to a person are not everyday. But we are now living in an age never contemplated by the mind of any mortal, living or dead. An age, as a friend insists on calling it, of marvel. I’m not positioned to argue. Steve has been altered - so it has altered much between us. In the best possible way. This has thrilled me deeply, has made me very happy. I never would have dared hoped it as the conclusion to the worries I’ve carried inside. I suspect I might just be among the luckiest men alive.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Nothing about Steve has been diminished. Rather, every aspect of him has been enhanced. That’s the term for it - as though they had Steve Rogers in mind when coining it. Enhance what’s already there - the brave, the faithful, the strong. The unwavering. It’s one hell of a thing. The men in the unit and regiment as a whole can’t wait for the Army to make more Captain Americas and for the enemy to watch out. I try explaining sometimes that it’s not about some magical experiment, but about Steve. That there could be entire regiments of Captain Americas but there’ll only be one Steve Rogers. They don’t understand, don’t believe. They think it’s because of the transformation. I suppose it’s better this way. I wouldn’t want them feeling what it’s like to know Steve Rogers without Steve even understanding— well, you know the rest. But we do have Steve. And he’s all we need.</i>
</p><p><i>Becca, you should know something,</i> his favorite one read. <i>Steve is the best thing to happen to our side in this terrible war. How odd that I spent all my life holding him back from running straight into a brick wall, only to discover in the midst of war that every single person alive probably has a reason for being who they are. It takes Steve and Steve alone to do what Captain America does. I wish you could see. That I could explain to you what our Steve has become. I can’t imagine how proud his folks would have been. As for me, well, I take offense if you ask. Ha. I know you go over these letters and just shake your head, but I maintain my right to have been severely shocked at opening my eyes to a new Steve Rogers. But I know you want an answer. So I will tell you. What I feel for him knows no bounds. After a life seeing his joy only ever mingled with pain, I find it almost blinding to look at him now. If we do live in an age of marvel, an age of possibilities, then where do we, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes of Brooklyn New York, go from here?</i></p><p>—</p><p>The giant hum of the Helicarrier once more filled the world.</p><p>Seated on the floor of his quarters with his back against the wall, he had his eyes closed, head back against it.</p><p>Softly, gradually, his mind emptied of further thought.</p><p>—</p><p>A day later, he was in his quarters, occupying the space beneath the picture widow and looking out at the approaching night-half of the planet they were traversing. It was spectacular. Tony’s new Helicarrier engines meant the craft never had to come down, could stay perpetually up. It was like living in the clouds. The craft’s running lights, green on this side, casting a glow far into the white vapor like thought illuminating memories.</p><p>Had he ever even lived in the same world as Bucky?</p><p>Suddenly, he began hearing Bucky laughing. Laughing and laughing, until he started feeling like a person walking around dressed as a banana and wondering why everyone was laughing. Lowering his head, and blushing, he nodded in acquiescence.</p><p>Okay, fine, he was an idiot. Always had been.</p><p>Flattered indeed.</p><p>He was blushing. Blushing. So hard he could feel his heart going at the back of his throat. </p><p>But soon it was wringing itself out painfully.</p><p>He should never have left him. Buck never would have, and the world could take a hike. Bucky would have taken him as he was, cared for him as he was. Taken no chances— <i>Just stop,</i> he pleaded with himself, <i>don’t do this.</i></p><p>It hurt like a brand applied directly to his heart. When he thought of what they had done to Bucky . . . what Buck used to be like, the guy every guy wanted to be . . . and the shell they made of him. Hardly able to smile, laugh, relax, play, feel. Hardly able to remember even himself.</p><p>He turned over his hand and at his hand, realizing it was trembling. He just stared at it.</p><p>From the day he and Bucky crashed back into the same timeline of existence, he had wanted only one thing — to get Bucky safe. He didn’t care what anyone else wanted. He fully intended that when it was time, he would pull every favor, make every threat necessary to see Bucky settled and left alone, finding him space to put down roots wherever Bucky wished.</p><p>Yet since that day, for the entire nearly four years — three years <i>and eight months</i> — they hadn’t had a moment’s peace. It had been clashes, battles, exiles. No real moment to themselves. No chance for the cyclone that had been their lives since leaving Brooklyn to stop tearing things up.</p><p>No chance to simply throw their arms around each other and celebrate, like he had seen in those V-Day movies which he loved, but envied so much. Just having a moment to wrap each other up and cry and thank the stars that they had somehow made it, and cry for those who hadn’t. Not once had he been able to hold Bucky, tell him everything would be okay, without someone — the whole world — looking over their shoulder.</p><p>No time to find out who they had become as men, following their survival of a war.</p><p>So all he had wanted, at the all-clear, was to grab Bucky and go — make a fast break toward the future. The past, history, their gear in the Smithsonian, the world was free to keep it all.</p><p>But no less than the future, the past, it seemed, also awaited discovery.</p><p>—</p><p>
  <i>Steve came by the unit’s tents earlier.</i>
</p><p>He was alone in his quarters and he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to read Bucky’s letters until he was sick with it.</p><p>
  <i>He comes by and I find myself looking closely at his features. Looking for all I recognize. Then he starts speaking and I smile because I know it’s Steve - and the problem is that I continually fall into a pit of worry. That somehow all of this would have changed him. But it seems, never. That’s forever my concern. That Steve stay Steve.</i>
</p><p>But he had uncovered a theme.</p><p>What had Bucky been so worried about, that he’d change. To what? It was in half his early letters and unquestionably what had caused all that tension between them right from the aid station. Maybe even earlier, maybe on the march. </p><p>Why would Bucky think such a thing? It had bothered him then and after seven decades it was eating him alive.</p><p>
  <i>Damn it.</i>
</p><p>He swung his legs from bed and got up, and against his better judgement, he exited his quarters.</p><p>At Sam’s door, he pushed the buzzer lightly, shortly. Then repeated, giving Sam time to know it wasn’t random noise. Being 3 am and all. A moment later the steel door slid open with Sam standing there. Blinking sleep from his eyes. “Cap,” he said urgently. “What’s going on? What’s the story?”</p><p>“Why would Bucky be worried that I wouldn’t still be me? Why would he be so concerned about that?” </p><p>Sam blinked slowly at him. Then Sam’s eyes began narrowing. But he’d expected this, and got in his questions quickly, whispering so Natasha wouldn’t somehow overhear. “Half his early letters have this undertone of— like he was worried I’d turned into . . . I don’t know. Someone else.”</p><p>“An asshole, maybe?”</p><p>Seeing the darkness gathered in Sam’s eyes, he stepped back. “This is <i>important,</i>” he assured him, sticking out a finger. “Which is why I wanted to ask you while it was still fresh in my mind.” He backed away some more. “G’night.” </p><p>“It’s a tooootally reasonable concernnnn,” Sam groaned the following morning, at the tail end of plotting a recon mission into the vicinity of Tbilisi, Georgia. “Asshole <i>would</i> have been the next step for most people.”</p><p>He was sitting on the desk next to Sam, who was working at a console in a secure mission room, so they were alone, but he still shushed Sam. “But <i>why</i> would Buck think that of me,” he asked. “Buck knows me. <i>Knew</i> me. Better than anyone alive.”</p><p>“You need to stop living in your head so much, Steve.” </p><p>He stopped, frowning heavily. “I don’t. I haven’t for— a really long time.” </p><p>“Well, you’re acting like you are. Remember how I said you acting dumb is not cute? I meant that.” Sam cut himself off, swept him a side-eye. “Reading your hot letters and acting the fool all night.”</p><p>He raised his brow. “Excuse me, I’m sorry I interrupted your beauty sleep,” he said indignantly.</p><p>Sam paused at the console. Then resumed and said, “You really need this explained?”</p><p>“Yes,” he said, seriously. “I do.” </p><p>“All right, well, listen closely. <i>Anyone</i> would be worried that their childhood friend, now gifted with the strength and speed of a killer gorilla cheetah beast, might just . . . maaaaybe in anger toward the world, maaaaaybe in retaliation toward the world . . . turn arrogant and insufferable. Insufferable, Steve. You understand? And maybe, I don’t know, with your looks, a whore also. Basically, no longer the person he knows. You understand?”</p><p>He caught his breath, deeply. It still hurt. But . . . “I understand.”</p><p>Sam locked his jaw, nodded officiously. Then said, “But that wasn’t what Bucky Barnes was worried about.”</p><p>He looked at Sam. “What?” he asked in confusion.</p><p>Sam swiped and typed away. “You know nothing about dames, do you.”</p><p>“What’s going on?” said Natasha, striding in. Sweeping a look over him before locking eyes meaningful on Sam. He stood up, extending a hand toward her and sweeping it toward Sam. “He’s all yours.”</p><p>“Fifteen minutes, Steve,” Sam called.</p><p>“Yup,” he said. And more confused than when he’d entered, he let the door swish closed behind him, cutting off Natasha’s steamy whispers.</p><p>Taking the stairs six floors up to their deck, he entered his quarters and got into gear. Just enough time to tighten his glove as a brisk, officious sounding buzz came at his door. Probably a briefing before they departed for the mission.</p><p>He’d never enjoyed them during the War, had certainly not missed this part of working for SHIELD. Still, looked like Sam was done. This was promising to be the rest of his day . . . </p><p>—</p><p>It took the Quinjet, an extra pair of SHIELD operatives, the rest of the day, and into the night. When they returned, Maria Hill wanted to see the three of them for a debriefing and any final briefing before the mission itself. He had to admit that having SHIELD back had sped up locating the weapons. Not to talk of securely storing them. It was everything else after that point that gave him concern. Nothing Nick Fury told him would convince him the weapons weren’t being used in service of some SHIELD-Stark Industries agenda.</p><p>Couple hours later, they were only just finishing up with Maria. All day, he’d been trying to get his expression to shift from the preoccupied tension he couldn’t seem to get rid of.</p><p>“Everything all right, Cap?” Maria eventually asked. </p><p>“Yeah, I’m fine.” </p><p>Natasha made a burning interested face, Sam kept a straight one.</p><p>“No problems with those arc—”</p><p>“Yeah, I’m fine,” he repeated, interrupting Sam, whose straight face, commendably, didn’t alter. “Thanks,” he added.</p><p>“Not a problem.”</p><p>Maria Hill looked expressionlessly between the two of them, Natasha’s interested one intensified. </p><p>“What’s going on?” Natasha demanded. “Am I being left out of something? Cause I pay my taxes like everyone else and I demand to know.” </p><p>Sam broke into a series of quiet chuckles while Maria smoothly wrapped up the meeting, and with a nod at them, departed.</p><p>“I’m going back to my quarters,” he said. And ignored Natasha’s exploded eyeballs.</p><p>“<i>You sit right there,</i>” he heard Natasha hiss at Sam as he made an exit. There’d be all kinds of reckoning with Natasha, he knew this. But for now he was happy to weave around her.</p><p>Inside his quarters, the door hadn’t quite swished shut when his intercom sounded. He went over and pushed to answer. “This is Steve.”</p><p>“You left . . . in a . . . hurry,” Sam said very slowly. “Are . . . you . . . hungry?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Yeah, y’are . . .”</p><p>He lifted his finger, disconnecting. Smiling to himself. </p><p>No one’s fault but his. No one had asked him to discuss any of it with Sam. Yet when he’d needed an actual answer, Sam had been all but useless. </p><p>Locating the pad on his bed, he first went in for a shower, and returning, laid down and pulled the pad to him. Searched through his bookmarks. </p><p>Finding the ones he’d grown a weakness for, he settled in and read once more, the words warming his stomach like a hot meal. Bucky’s words. After a while, he set the pad on his stomach and stared out at the moving night outside.</p><p>He didn’t know what Bucky worried he would change to. But he did know what had altered fundamentally between them <i>in the best possible way.</i></p><p>It was the exact way he too would have described it. Just as Bucky had experienced a fundamental shift that night outside of Lucca, so had he as well had his not long after.</p><p>It had been one night in a deuce, the standard mode of transport of troops. Rolling through the Italian countryside, about a couple months after Hydra’s surprise attack in Lucca, Buck had been singing.</p><p>No one could kick back and let out a tune like Buck in the back of deuce. That night, tearing at high speeds to their next drop-off, Bucky had been rollin’ it smooth enough to make ol’ Fred himself weep. <i>Some day, when I’m awfully low,</i> Buck had been crooning, smiling at him, <i> . . . when the world is cold . . . I will feel a glow, just thinking of you . . . And the way you look tonight.</i> He’d offered Bucky his spot on the semi-defunct Captain America USO tour right there and then, to cackles from everyone, and an even warmer smile from Bucky. </p><p>Then later, everyone asleep now, he and Buck had been shoulder to shoulder. And he remembered looking at Gabe and Jackie across from them; sweet, quiet Jackie cuddled against Gabe’s side with Gabe’s arms around him. Jackie fell asleep like a baby anywhere, but only if you cuddled him. Turning from them, he began looking at Bucky, who was speaking softly about their supply chain probably having been hit somewhere and so likely to cause a problem that would affect the regiment, if not entire divisions. “And with just a couple months to go till winter,” Buck had been saying. “They’re saying we’ll get patched up in the line by then, but they’re always saying things that. Better for us mortals to scrounge for not just extra food these days, you know?”</p><p>While Bucky spoke, he’d fallen into a distracted daze, noticing once more how his new body brought him literally physically closer to Bucky. And how much he liked that. How much being shoulder to shoulder with him like this brought with it a world of sensations he would never have seen coming. As a kind of . . . side effect of the transformation.</p><p>The world shrank in its wake, and he seemed to hear his voice more clearly. The voice he had heard all his life, much more clearly. Feeling his body more immediately, his breath more strongly, and noticing even more how Bucky’s eyes probably were the bluest things any dame had ever seen.</p><p>Looking at Bucky, feeling as though he was seeing eyes he’d known all his life for the first time, and feeling a soaring confidence and happiness he had simply never felt before. Right there in the middle of a war. That yes, absolutely, he could take on the world. With Bucky he could.</p><p>It was his sense of confidence that had been altered. And which had altered their bond <i>in the best possible way.</i></p><p>Not a sense of confidence toward Bucky, but toward the world. Sam had been slightly off in his analysis — he had already been that person who attacked the world out of pain and resentment. But lifelong anguish vanished, the world was suddenly shiny, lighter. And in such a world, Bucky had become the brightest thing in it.</p><p>Bucky apparently too had seen that. Enough to have written about it in his letters. About how much it had thrilled him. <i>Deeply.</i></p><p>And he wondered now . . . what else had Bucky hoped.</p><p>Outside, the green glow in the clouds dimmed momentarily, allowing sight of a golden moon, before coming back up again. Red on this side now, no longer green.</p><p>Simply changed. Pensive to urgent.</p><p>He felt a small smile. Reading all these letters and getting poetic.</p><p>He’d been crazy, locking away the past and believing that to be the answer. In refusing to fill himself up with his own world, all he’d done was create a giant hole inside him.</p><p>He missed and thought of his men often. Of course he did. Whether he chose to explore his memories or not, they existed. His lost brothers, the family he’d found in war. So he promised himself that when Bucky came back to him, they would keep a private memorial to the unit together. He’d see to that.</p><p>As for Bucky’s letters. He knew Bucky better than anyone dead or alive, and Bucky’s letters read exactly as he would have imagined love letters written by Bucky Barnes to Steve Rogers would.</p><p>Slowly turning his head, he stared up at the pale ceiling.</p><p>It wasn’t flattery he was feeling. He was in love with Bucky.</p><p>Silence stayed with him for a long time after that thought. A blank space in which he listened over and over to the words being played back in his head.</p><p>Yeah. That sounded about right.</p><p>•</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. ASSASSIN'S DREAM</h2></a>
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            <p>In Wakanda, healing is mystical, ancestral. A World War Two veteran with post traumatic stress disorder... or the deadliest assassin the world has ever known. Either way, his mind unfurls... and at the center is Steve Rogers.</p>
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</div><hr/><p><i>“Hiya Buck,”</i> the dream had begun.</p><p>Flat on his back on the woven floor rug, he was still gasping, still trying to grasp and keep hold of the sensations from the dream, sensations already dispersing like smoke.</p><p>The giant spheres of watered silk populating his dreams had come to a standstill. Unknown how or why. For months now, teasing him. Staying forever outside of his reach no matter how far he extended his touch. Inside his dreams, no longer able to touch. Inside their spheres, experiences of exquisite perfection denied him. Causing him heart pain, delusions of horny, desperate, unfulfilled dreaming as a higher bridge to gods or Ancestors. Screwing up his mind until physical touch had become a terrible tease, a physical discomfort to his recovering mind and body.</p><p>But last night he had reached out . . . and they hadn’t moved. Allowing him to touch the largest one. The one that had come and settled itself before him. And he laid there catching his breath because on touching it — </p><p>Out of the sphere had walked Steve.</p><p>“Hiya, Buck,” Steve said, smiling.</p><p>Behind Steve, unheeded by Steve, the sphere had burst apart with a great, silent, splash. While he struggled to understand what was happening, Steve merely stood there, shining.</p><p>The spheres existed in a void, the pure dark of an intermediary space. It wasn’t foreign land to him. It was why, in fact, his healers told him, his dreams existed there — it was what he was used to, where he felt safest. No doubt. But he didn’t know this either. </p><p>The sphere which had apparently killed itself around Steve, was multicolored, swirling with images that seemed familiar to him. But everything was dissolving. Leaving before him only Steve Rogers. Hands in his pockets, smiling right at him.</p><p>Steve was dressed in the navy cargoes and T-shirt that was the uniform of SHIELD operatives. After his smile and greeting, saying nothing more. </p><p>It was strange, heart-pounding. To have touched the sphere and not walk in to escapist mindlessness, but to have Steve emerge. There in his formless dream, in plain sight of what felt like his conscious, not his dreaming mind, Steve was looking at him as if . . . </p><p>“You can see me?” he whispered in a voice that cracked.</p><p>Steve dipped his head slightly, smiling all over again. “Yes, I can, Bucky.”</p><p>His heart was pounding. Aware he was inside a dream but unable to lessen his responses. Because it wasn’t a conversation of a kind his fevered need had ever conjured.</p><p>Because Steve’s smiling eyes, flushed skin and . . . very sentient smile, weren’t normal plugins of his dreams.</p><p>And as he remained immobile, Steve slowly came forward, taking his hand.</p><p>It was like being reanimated from a deep, silent sleep. From the tips of the fingers Steve held, to his head, to his knees, down to his feet, feeling flowed throughout his body like electricity being restored.</p><p>His breath caught, his eyes fluttering closed at the sensation washing through him, as his hand reflexively tightened around Steve’s . . . and gasping softly . . . slowly fell forward, caught by Steve’s body. Steve’s arm caught him around the waist, the only thing holding him upright while his knees took their time in turning solid again. Steve brought up the hand he was holding to his mouth, kissed it. Like a gentleman at a dance. Then Steve slid his hand up his living arm, held him as he lowered his head to his left shoulder. Began to kiss him there, along his shoulder, down to the dull, lightning scars. And as Steve tightened his arms around him, causing his breaths to shake from him, he squeezed shut his eyes, in pained need. Because he knew what it felt like to be held by him, to feel his arms around him and be hugged . . . to feel his touch on his scars, the softest of firm brushes, over and over . . . and the feel of his lips against his skin, kisses to his temple, to his cheek . . . </p><p>But he had never felt his kiss on his mouth. The touch of his lips to his own . . . whether the softest of brushes, or something more . . . he had never felt it, so this was all he had. This was all he could manage, when he wanted so much more. Steve hugged and squeezed him, the movement rocking them both, fervently kissing his shoulder, saying nothing.</p><p>But he knew his voice, knew the sound of his whispers, and he had long since discovered that he could at least give the necessary words . . . and he did . . . And Steve whispered them to him, just as he needed them said . . . melting his body like a molten substance. Everywhere he touched him, with his hands or his mouth, he disintegrated. And Steve’s hold around him got tighter, his body more insistent, and when Steve straightened suddenly, brought their bodies together, forehead pressed to his temple, his lower half coming hard against him, Steve started pushing hard, and when shuddering, mouth open, grabbing him, he’d pushed back as hard as he could — </p><p>And had vibrated right off his bed.</p><p>Gasping softly, lying there. Staring at the dawn arriving across the ceiling of his bedroom. That was always as far as he could get. Because apparently, even in his literal wildest dreams, he couldn’t imagine what that would feel like. Submerged in his dream even as it faded, taking soft breaths to calm his raging body, he slowly, slowly fell back down to Earth.</p><p>He closed his eyes.</p><p>—</p><p>Morning in his small neighborhood was always a quiet, sleepy affair. </p><p>His was the farthest out among an outlier of cottages, right by the forest clearing. Their homes were surrounded by walking lanes that trailed south and slightly down the small hill from his backyard. And from his kitchen window, he could see about two hundred meters away where the lanes congregated more homes around a small neighborhood gathering space. Circular, furnished with cushioned bamboo chairs and recliners and thatched overhead shade. A little town square used by adults at night. In the mornings it was a small outdoor kindergarten. Being barely dawn, at the moment there was no one there save farmers and weavers passing through on the start of their day.</p><p>Finished with breakfast and placing his dishes in the large granite sink, he watched the light outside turning slowly, easing from the odd banana yellow into a more familiar golden hue, morning replacing dawn. Soon to be the blueish gold he loved so much, for also containing the soft reds and alabaster. Each and every dawn since his awaking, he watched the colors emerge with his heart filling to the brim. Unaware for the longest time why the colors gave him such comfort.</p><p>But a golden hue, never mind a bluish one, indicated that the morning was coming along, and that the dream and needing time to . . . recover had set him back on his schedule. It was a healing day, with the journey to the River sides, where the Waters were, requiring a solid hour’s travel on train and hovercraft. As fast as their trains moved, that distance was practically like traveling to England in an hour. Including that he had to pass the palace complex, while convincing himself he wasn’t glimpsing the King on a balcony somewhere watching him go. As much as he loved Wakanda, he didn’t like thinking his stay was predicated on his continued attendance to healing. But he didn’t have to consider something he already knew.</p><p>Leaning against his kitchen counter, he didn’t immediately go. Instead he ran his thumb across his fingers. That dream had been so . . . different. No contest, the most surreal of lucid dreams he’d ever had. </p><p>When those giant spheres of water had first appeared in his dreams and he’d experienced what was in them, himself whole, Steve touching and kissing him in a better version of the day he went under, he’d gone crazy as an addict crossing into them. Waiting with the shakes all day to return to his dreams. But for some time now, he hadn’t been able to. . . .  Unable to catch them no matter what he tried, and would wake weeping into the dawn. His therapist definitely had her theories on that.</p><p>But what had happened last night, he hadn’t been the cause of any of that. He knew that for sure. The spheres had just stopped moving on their own. Steve had walked out of them on his own.</p><p>And that meant what? Maybe nothing at all. In Wakanda, after all, he dreamt all kinds of things.</p><p>Sighing, he slowly left the kitchen.</p><p>Shortly after, showered and almost ready to go — his arm in a fitted, waterproof sling, customized from the ones they had first provided him — he stood at his bedroom door looking at the heap of mess he’d made on the floor, grateful he lived alone and not in a barracks anymore. No aspiring comedian soldier worth his salt would have let him live down this new nocturnal feature of his. Vibrating for cock. It would have been a real headliner, that was for sure.</p><p>At his bedside, he slowly picked bed-cloths, pillows and cushions off the woven rugs, like a bombed out shelter of rich colors. Putting to rights the room, he closed the shutters last. Then instead of leaving, he just leaned against the wall, looking around the room with a sense of calm satisfaction. </p><p>He’d done all right by himself here. Hadn’t he? In the last eight months, fighting his way back to rediscovering Bucky Barnes. Letting these people who considered it their human-mandated responsibility to help do so. He thought so anyway. </p><p>And occasionally, his therapist and healer always told him, it was important to take measure and pat oneself on the back. Somehow, <i> . . . all evidence of his embarrassing night destroyed,</i> he thought, smirking, this morning seemed like such an occasion. </p><p>He looked around his small bedroom.</p><p>When he had moved out of the palace complex, Shuri, in her ever random teenage wisdom had known what he would prefer, in terms of living space for helping himself heal. He’d chosen country living from the get go. Away from the capital city and the floor of royal apartments set aside for him with its many luxuries and nearly magical future tech. He belonged there as much as he belonged in the Imperial Palace of China. </p><p>In Wakanda there was tech everywhere, but there was also an aesthetic the country folk subscribed to, over which Shuri had sagely nodded.</p><p>“Rustic,” Shuri had told him it was called. He’d taken her word for it. So in place of glass and vibranium alloy, he lived in . . . He’d looked around at his new cottage with a smile. “Unrefined luxury,” he’d countered her. She’d shaken her head and rolled her eyes, and introduced him to his neighbors, from whom, she’d told him, he could get his “pots and pans.”</p><p>So he had. Most were artisans, a few even consenting to teach him their craft, so he had been all set. And had set about making this place his own — his big wooden bed frame, dresser, hand carved chairs and stools, his hand-stitched pillows and cushions and upholstery, woven rugs and bed-cloths, an assortment of goat-hair rugs, and all the beautiful tapestries and batiks of scenes of local industry which had been his welcome to the neighborhood gifts from his neighbors. Every last thing in his home was a personal item with meaning to him.</p><p>His neighbors had been deeply bemused by him moving in. Baffled, he’d asked the old man down the path, who’d come by one evening, bringing him the most beautiful earthenware he had ever seen as a house-warming gift.</p><p>“What is this funny to you?” he asked, forcing every phrase of Wakandan he knew at the time, while gesturing to himself and around at his move-in efforts. “My splace,” he’d said, essentially, mangling the language translation.</p><p>“It’s not funny,” the old man, whose name was Citu, said in clear English. Commendably, not laughing at his language failures while righting a small lopsided kiln, which he’d thought he had set down correctly, before finding himself a stool to sit. “But <i>you</i> are, White Wolf. Seeking pots for kitchens when the Family of Panthers awaits on every breath from you.”</p><p>He’d even tried to smile politely at Citu’s assessment. The thought that anyone, much less a royal family, much less <i>that</i> one, would wait hand and foot on Bucky from Brooklyn. He wasn’t sure he’d managed it.</p><p>“But so it is,” said Citu. “Solitude is what defines the lone wolf.”</p><p>“That,” he’d replied. “Or exile.”</p><p>But the cottage, Shuri had assured him, was his to do with as he wished. And no greater sense of contentment had he felt outside of growing up in Brooklyn than returning after a day of healing to a home of his own making.</p><p>So, measure taken. Pat on the back bestowed.</p><p>So just one more thing before he departed. He’d get lip for being late, but this part was nonnegotiable. </p><p>He went and opened his front door wide, and stood there for a moment with his face turned up — to the beautiful world and life he had so miraculously been gifted. Also, to let his pet goats, Brooklyn and Dodger, know he was up. Both of whom would soon come trotting up for their self-appointed morning duty. Leaving the door open, he returned briefly to the kitchen, opening up the compost bin. </p><p>Bowl of leftovers compiled, he returned to his stoop, sitting on the top step and setting the bowl between his feet. Sure enough, here they came, mom and pops to the much younger and less interested New York and Yankees, cantering up to an interested stop before him. Didn’t matter whether it was all in his head, whether or not they actually knew what he needed, their uncanny ability to sense that he was leaving for therapy, whenever he needed unconditional comfort, wasn’t to be underestimated.</p><p>Brooklyn, that was the pops, pushed his head under his missing arm, slowly rubbing his crown against the bottom of his sling, then finding a resting spot for his head on his thigh, closed his eyes and let out a satisfied snort. Dodger, the mom, stood before him staring soulful, unblinking black eyes at him. Then she brought her nose forward until it touched his face, rubbing first his nose, then his cheek. And he smiled, allowing himself to imagine that they could indeed hear his thoughts. Feel the sensation of paper that was the ground he trod. He planted a kiss to her bony face. Then watched as she and her hubby folded their legs beneath their black, white and brown bodies and settled down to enjoy a morning treat.</p><p>Around him, his closest neighbors were moving about, parents greeting each other and asking after their children. Children they had only just seen the night before, but Wakandans loved their young. Which, he had come to since realize, seemed to include him.</p><p>“<i>Babahl,”</i> his nearest one called. “<i>A’angi</i>?” <i>White Wolf, are you going?</i></p><p>“Yes,” he called back, and she nodded, wordlessly encouraging him as she did each time, to simply keep going.</p><p>He watched his goats a moment longer. The sunlight was changing, however, the bluish replacing even the golden hue, meaning he was really pushing things. Endless sass awaited him. Reaching up behind him, he tapped a hovercraft call button on the door frame.</p><p>Then he stood up to shut the door, and paused when he saw the soft hazel glow of his communicator on the side table, pulsing.</p><p>He had a message. From Steve.</p><p>He managed to make his hand let go of the door handle and slowly walked over. And stared at it for a long moment. Then he reached down and placed his palm on the small domed device, unlocking it.</p><p>“Hiya, Buck,” said Steve.</p><p>His heart slammed nearly right out of his chest. But immediately he told himself to can it — Steve began all his messages in the same way, and likely he’d incorporated it into his subconscious, rather than his dream somehow having presented the future. </p><p>Then he noticed the complete silence coming from the device and checked whether he’d paused it by mistake. It was still pulsing. Running down a four minute message.</p><p>Steve was just . . . silent.</p><p>“Ah,” breathed Steve, quietly. Followed by a silence so drawn out, only the golden digital countdown assured him that the message was still running. Making him wonder whether the rest had been accidentally erased.</p><p>Then Steve was speaking again. In a slow, very low voice. As if trying not to . . . agitate himself.</p><p>“Sam, Natasha and me . . . We got a . . . uh . . . whaddaya call it, a . . . uh . . .  We’re somewhere over Central Europe with a . . . you know, when you get a . . . when there’s conf— Intel.” </p><p>Then an abyss of total silence. Although he thought he heard . . . a barely audible sigh. <i>What . . .?</i> he thought vacantly, looking at the thing.</p><p>The domed device gently pulsed its light at him, as if breathing.</p><p>Around him, his home had turned a decidedly bluish gold. He could hear his goats quietly eating. And he was definitely late for therapy with the Wariza. But he couldn’t even breathe, never mind move.</p><p>Steve sighed more heavily, and in firmer tones, continued. “We got intel ‘bout’a— some kinda— Well, they got themselves a whole stack’a Chitauri weapons down there, claiming rights in case of some new future alien attack or somethin’. They got scientists and a base and everything, reverse engineering them, if you can believe it. I swear, sometimes it feels like no time has passed since—” Abrupt silence. “When we— you and me— in— in the War, when we—” Another silence. Then very firmly, “Since we took down Hydra way back when. A base and everything. And scientists.” And a long, long pause. “I think— I— I said that already.”</p><p>Raising his eyebrows at the device, he tried to see who the hell was making the recording. <i>What the fuck?</i></p><p>“Anyway,” resumed the distracted, vapid voice that was apparently Steve’s. Soft, yet firm at once, as though very subtly wrestling with itself.</p><p>“Anyway . . .”</p><p>The seconds leisurely slid off the indifferent communicator.</p><p>And he continued standing there listening to Steve . . . not speaking. Then Steve started up once more.</p><p>“Anyway,” Steve said, for the third time. And he almost demanded <i>Anyway what?</i> forgetting for a second that it was a prerecorded message. </p><p>And then quietly, <i>timidly,</i> Steve said, “That’s all for now, I guess. Talk to you later, Bucky.”</p><p>But he continued staring at the communicator. Seeing as there were actually forty seconds left. Forty seconds of a planetary sized silence this time, into which absolutely anything could have fit, but which the only words that seemed to were: <i>Love you.</i></p><p>And it wasn’t that he had never heard those words from Steve. It was just . . . </p><p>A soft <i>beep-beep</i> broke across his thoughts like gunfire.</p><p>His hovercraft had arrived. </p><p>Turning a last look at the communicator, he watched the timer reach zero and the device go dark. And still stood there, until the hovercraft beeped again, indicating that a minute had passed. He slowly left his home. Stepping over the now napping couple on his doorstep, he vaulted straight up into the hovercraft. It instantly accelerated toward the capital.</p><p>Too wound up to sit, he stood by the controls, staring unseeing at the passing countryside below, not even registering as slow country life began giving way to suburban neighborhoods, then gradually to mounting city bustle. It was as if the world had fallen dead silent, and all he could hear was the sound of his beating heart, the sound of Steve’s double-barreled silences, and the magnified sound of Steve’s . . . What had been in his voice? He did sit down, and took a breath, willing his heart to stop beating so hard so he could think. But it was impossible. He didn’t even notice when the hovercraft began descending to the train station.</p><p>Mag-Wav Riders not being allowed into the airspace of the River Tribes, for no other reason than that the people were exceptionally meditative, or self-important as Shuri determined it, disliking noise and outside interference of any kind, anyone wishing to visit got dropped off at a regional station and took the super high speed train out.</p><p>Even without his and Steve’s famous outings eight months prior, even without his now-distinctive sling, or his legend preceding him, even without his healing with the feared and mystical Wariza as common knowledge, his presence as the King’s special guest from the Lands Beyond was enough to make every trip into the City an interesting experience. Most people kept a courteous social distance, he wasn’t cornered like some movie star or something, but plenty nodded and made eye contact, and teenagers invariably sent him thumbs-ups; he also got a respectable amount of return eyefucking whenever he was caught at it, so that was always a nice morale booster.</p><p>But dropping from the hovercraft, that morning he wished he’d worn a hooded jersey. But keeping his head down, he risked appearing unsociable and was thankful as the train arrived just as he reached the platform. And getting on, he didn’t bother trying to find a seat in the crowded car and instead made his way to the nearest corner, leaning against the clear glass wall and staring out as the train took off. With the glass walls, it was like standing on a magic carpet, being zipped through the air. It wasn’t until then, his eyes determinedly outward, his heartbeat slowing, that he was able to catch a breath as his chest eased up a little. </p><p>But closing his eyes, jaw tightened, he lowered his head. That hadn’t just been a dream.</p><p>—</p><p>The train slowly but surely emptied, leaving him and a serious looking middle aged man the only ones left. Views of mountainous heights and dizzying valleys had suddenly spread around them a while back, as the train lasered for the land of the Waters. Until abruptly, yet with no force he could feel, the train came to its terminus. Nothing more than a platform with a shelter for sun or rain. </p><p>His co-passenger stepped off before him, nodding a silent goodbye and crossing to the other side of the station toward a walking path. The path led to a town he had never visited. This side of the platform faced a vast forest. </p><p>Altogether a desolate locale that looked like the entrance to a mystical emerald land. Being precisely what it was.</p><p>Leaving the terminus behind, it was a thirty minute hike through paradise, the same trail Shuri had taken him on in those first days of his waking, at the end of which, without conscious sensation of rising ground, waited the summit of a cliff. Thirty minutes with Shuri anyway, by himself he could reach it in much less time. But why do so. Who rushed a nature walk.</p><p>And that morning in particular, he made himself keep that pace. Reminding himself he was late whatever he did,  and to take it easy . . . just take it easy. Ignore for now the message which was now fully embedded in his body, rapturously doing a slow dance with his dream. He just had to get to Luma, his therapist and healer. The walk also appeared to serve a basic purpose, to bring focus to the literal journey to a place of healing. So clearing his mind, he focused on exactly that — getting to his destination. </p><p>Reaching the cliff’s summit, he looked down and saw the turquoise Waters of the Ancestors. An enormous lake ringed by a bank of sand and rock, the place into which, in view of the Royal Family and his fellow warriors, the Wariza had first plunged him, and pulled him from, and declared him awoken, a baptism to begin a journey to healing. Staring for a minute, he took in the singular, slow moving sight of the jewels of the Earth — rubies, emeralds, diamonds, lapis, gold dust — flowing as water. More colors than he could define. Swirling and waiting. The bank was called the Upper Shores, initially confusing him since the lake was at the bottom of an almighty ravine. But he soon came to understand.</p><p>The voices of the occupants, ancestors of the Wakandans and humans of millennia past, were silent. That first morning, he’d heard them, <i>You will come to us . . . we will keep you safe . . . </i> Those voices were silent now, and when he jumped in there would be no pulling at his soul, no matches striking fires against his skin. No frights in his mind. He’d asked Luma why it had stopped, why it was no longer as it had been that first time, and she had turned a startled face at him as if he was completely crazy, asking how exactly anyone was supposed to survive a daily plunge into that. The Waters were whatever they needed to be — and for now, for him, they were just a passage.</p><p>It was a far plunge. Had been that first morning, always was. Cliff diving, basically. But down there lay his healing. </p><p>So taking some steps back and filling his lungs with air, he flew toward the edge . . . leaping skyward, the clear bluish gold of the world seeming to absorb him . . . and then headfirst, he was falling . . . The Waters didn’t so much splash as sucked in. Instead of water going upward in displacement, a funnel sucked him down like through a straw . . . pulling him like a missile.</p><p>Until the drop would simply terminate, and suddenly suspended, he would open his eyes as the green waters wavered a colorful world into place. And before him would be the Entrance to the Caverns, his ultimate destination. The Entrance was a vast, incredibly, <i>sunlit</i> arch of rock, like a gaping tunnel into the base of a mountain. And he would swim toward it.</p><p>And then he would be pulling himself onto a beach, the actual Shores of the Waters, almost always having to one-handedly re-knot his hair from the force of entry. Same as he would almost always turn and look behind him, never getting used to the bizarre, surreal experience of the swim from start to finish.</p><p>For once past the threshold of the Entrance, instead of still being underwater it was this — finding yourself climbing out onto a shore. It was unquestionably the most disorienting thing he had ever experienced.</p><p>The Wariza lived in a subterranean world. The jump in, the swim through the entry, the resurfacing. It led there to the Shores, the landing deck of a world Jules Verne would have assigned himself to the loony bin daring to imagine. </p><p>The sand on the Shores were like glittering spilled milk. All around, a sudden emerald forest encircled, its base an ebony undergrowth, rendering any sight beyond impenetrable. Occasionally he tried to see beyond the tree line, but only managed a forest enlarging in his vision like a dizzying spell. On the Shores, the air was close, the sky perpetually an onyx band swirling through an indigo heaven. For a while he had wondered whether the onyx was actually the real world showing above, until he fully accepted that he really was somewhere beneath the Earth.</p><p>The whole effect should have been eerie, the swirling jeweled Waters, the glittering milk sand, the emerald of the forest, the living sky with the perpetual midnight glow it cast over the place. Unsettling, at least. Instead it was . . . stimulating. Sometimes . . . <i>really</i> stimulating.</p><p>Sopping wet, he started for the far end of the beach, where clearing a last wall of trees, the forest gave way to the base of a giant, golden-lit, hollow-faced mountain. The mountain was actually a massive, glowing ziggurat, the bioluminescent plants and fungi encircling its tiers the source of its apparent sunlight. Its entrance was identical to the one under the water — like being at a tourist destination after having spent time staring at its poster. Determinedly, he climbed toward it, crossing this threshold as well and finally entering the world inside.</p><p>The Caverns were enormous — ceilings too high to be seen, spaces too vast to comprehend. As large and as wide as open country. An interconnected series of spaces, as far as he knew, stretching as far as the country above. The colossal space presenting its entrance was lit by the bioluminescent glow almost to the detriment of eye sight. But a few minutes, and it sank in, not like seeing, more like being. The glowing moss was on rock face and floor alike, a soft heather-like plant just as soft to the touch. With the remaining plants and fungi the Wariza grew covering the rest of the walls and floor like a crashed rainbow. All around were the ancient women themselves, the Wariza — a word which simply translated in English to “the Women.” Robed in the same rich-colored, soft-textured cloth as his sling, their long, thick braids or big curly hair piled high on their heads: working, playing, singing, laughing. Always laughing, looking exactly like the happy, doped up old ladies they were.</p><p>Making his way across this entry Cavern to where his healer sat, he always found smiles with which to return their called greetings no matter his mood. A coping mechanism he’d learned in the early days of the often hellish difficulty, the heart-trembling fear of being there, and discovered it still helped. And that morning especially, presentiment slowly swelling inside him, he gladly slowed and let them affectionately pat him, ask after his goats. And he answered honestly, proud of what he had accomplished over eight months, suspecting his gifted herd was not just from the palace, but part and parcel of what the Women did.</p><p>They had healed him of his visual and mental traumas. He no longer looked around and saw spattered blood, head wounds, broken bodies. He no longer lost time. He no longer felt a faint trembling hearing screams he knew weren’t there. His heart no longer accelerated at the sound of a loud bang; at the cries of party revelers. Shuri had removed all the triggers, and they had done the rest in restoring his humanity.</p><p>They had taught him to manage his emotions, feelings, sensations and passions — responses he had not felt in five decades. Initially it had been overwhelming, beginning the morning of his awakening when the Queen had held him, when it had felt he would simply die on the Upper Shores of grief, when he had suddenly seen so many ghosts and faces in the depths that he should be dead from shock of a newly resorted human conscience, were it not for her taking him in her arms and breathing a space for acceptance into his mind.</p><p>From that morning straight through that very one, they had cared for him. Put him back together again.</p><p>And when he was healed, Shuri had told him, the Women would forget his name. His memories, experiences, and pain, and everything else that made up his time with them would be poured into the Waters, into their collective memory as a tribe, retained for the benefit of the next broken warrior.</p><p>He liked that very much. Even though the thought of Luma forgetting him broke his heart.</p><p>Slowly moving like a ghost in their midst, his clothes and body already dry and warm in the strange bioluminescent imitation sunlight, he found her at a corner against the rock wall. Luma, his designated Wariza caseworker. Seated among the glowing flora, she was reclined against the rock wall, her blood red robes wrapped around her, yawning in the morning light. Pulling distractedly on a curly chunk of iron grey hair, her face was slightly upturned, her dark skin gleaming in the gold light. She tilted her head at his approach, the rest of her going still. And she smiled. She was blind, and needed very little to know it was him.</p><p>“Hm,” she said as he drew nearer. “Hmm . . . mmm . . . Hm.” Then, incredibly cheekily, “Morning, Babahl.”</p><p>Reaching her, finding his usual space among the odd fungi, which to him seemed should only be found in the deep oceans, he sat on the Cavern floor facing her.</p><p>And proceeded to gaze skeptically at her.</p><p>When she said nothing whatsoever in the drawn out moment, he gave up. “You couldn’t possibly know,” he told her.</p><p>Raising her chin and taking a long, deep breath, as if to rub in just how much she <i>could</i> know by applying her other senses, she crooned, “You . . . <i>smell</i> different.”</p><p>Closing his eyes, he just shook his head. Hoping she didn’t mean what he thought she meant. Especially since this was by no means the first dream of its kind he’d had by any stretch. Hoping, but knowing he was wasting hope. She wasn’t bullshitting.</p><p>She was laughing quietly to herself. So thoroughly that she was having trouble catching her breath . . . “How’s this helping,” he sighed . . . which only made her laugh harder, bringing her robe over the lower half of her face and shaking her head, silently asking for a minute. He just sighed.</p><p>Their relationship, it bore mentioning, was fraught.</p><p>These old ladies persisted in acting dotty simply because they could. Having their fun with the young the same way old people had probably since the dawn of time. And Luma, never mind not being that old — she couldn’t be that much older than the Queen — never missed an opportunity. </p><p>She could be very funny, very loving, and when he was having a particularly bad day would tell him old stories of broken warriors to calm his heart. Stories of men and women whom they had helped, healed, like him. </p><p>But she could also spend the time while they tended the plants and fungi asking him embarrassing personal questions and making him blush, and herself laugh, like now, until she would have to breathlessly sit down.</p><p>Shuri postulated that the Wariza were actually crazy. <i>I don’t care how magical their tech, they’re not magic, Bucky, they’re crazy.</i> And in her terror sincerely hoped to never have to need them. But encouraged him to definitely keep it up.</p><p>He was older and knew these old women weren’t crazy. He’d seen crazy and this wasn’t it. Even doped up smoking their plants, there was something they had. Something which, contrary to Shuri’s personal opinion, the rest of Wakanda attributed to the continued presence of the Ancestors. </p><p>And he agreed. They did have magic. They lived under a lake, for one. But he believed it mainly because the Wariza spoke no Common Wakanda, no English, and he spoke no Ancient Wakandan.</p><p>Yet they communicated seamlessly. </p><p>Unimpressed, Shuri had rolled her eyes, telling him <i>of course</i> they had submersible vehicles hidden somewhere which they used for transport to the Upper Shores, and <i>of course</i> they had language translators tucked away all over the Caverns, which she hungrily made him describe to her. <i>The translators are probably in those plants and they have to be very careful not to smoke them.</i> The actual magical underwater city, meanwhile, impressed her even less. <i>Like no one’s ever heard of a force field, Bucky.</i></p><p>But Shuri was very wrong. What these women did had nothing to do with mechanical translation. Nothing to do with tech. He was living proof of what tech could do to a mind. But magic. . . .  Magic was for the heart.</p><p>Luma had finally gotten a hold of herself, sighing contentedly as she rearranged her robes around her once more, settling even more comfortably against the rock wall.</p><p>“What happened to you this morning,” she asked, richly. “Besides the obvious. And after you bathed.”</p><p>About answering, he stopped and sent her a look. Which she pretended not to sense, her face turned once more to the unseen ceiling above.</p><p>“I was going to give you a talking-to for coming so late, you know,” she continued placidly. “The plants are practically dying waiting for you. And that is never permitted. But this is <i>so</i> much more interesting.”</p><p>“What is,” he challenged, calling her bluff. What did he <i>smell</i> like, exactly.</p><p>“You tell me,” she said.</p><p>But he dropped it instead. He was just stalling. Walking into this place made him feel mountains and valleys of emotions he was never prepared for, and that was when he hadn’t received messages with Steve being weird.</p><p>And so his heart quietly kicked back up, slow and hard, so that he could feel it at the base of his throat. He’d wanted to sprout wings and fly to her for explanations, for answers, but now here, he found he couldn’t speak.</p><p>“Bucky . . .”</p><p><i>Fuck . . .</i> he thought, confused and feeling his heart slip. What had he thought he’d heard in that message that felt so large it would swallow his world whole. God help, there were times when he wished he could go back to the blank space of not fully grasping what emotions meant . . . </p><p>“Bucky.”</p><p>“I received a message this morning.”</p><p>“Oh?” she replied loudly, exaggeratedly, like a grandma to a toddler. Breaking his headspace. “What did it say?”</p><p>He narrowed his eyes at her, knowing full well what she had just done, getting him out of his own head. But she maintained a polite, merely interested expression. </p><p>Turning away, he  looked instead at the glowing mushrooms around his drawn up knees. Not wanting to believe that the plants had subtly begun leaning toward him, as though wanting to hear as well, he stared at their fluorescence a moment longer, making sure. Nothing moved. “It wasn’t so much what the message said. More . . . how it felt.”</p><p>She was silent.</p><p>So was he.</p><p>He looked around instead, at the world that shone. It was beautiful almost beyond description down there. Shuri had quivered with excitement as he tried to convey. And she wasn’t wrong to feel that way. He wasn’t permitted to tell her what they did all day, but normally his day with Luma consisted of tending and harvesting the odd fungi, hand mulching the rich soil, planting and transplanting, and scraping the glittering florescent powder from the plants into piles on the Cavern floor. The piles were separated not by color but plant. So that most times he ended up with a heap of multicolored dust. It was months before it occurred to him that this was the very glitter the young club goers of Zana sprinkled on their bodies. The powder was everything from medicinal to— well, decorative. And aware now of its origin, he wasn’t at all surprised at how stimulating it was to see it in the clubs.</p><p>“Bucky,” she said, firmly. In a tone that brooked no delay. </p><p>Still, he delayed.</p><p>She knew. Of course she knew. Never mind that he hadn’t told her that the message had come from Steve. She always knew more than she let on, and in this instance it had little to do with him still sparking off enough need from his dream to fry all her senses. She knew because in eight months, right from the morning he awoke and cried in the arms of a mythical Queen, he had refused to speak of Steve. And she had tried. Badgered. Threatened. Warned. But she might have more easily pulled his teeth.</p><p>She knew of his abiding panic of the future. All to do with Steve.</p><p>But . . . </p><p>“Something’s happened,” he rasped. “Something’s . . . different.”</p><p>She waited.</p><p>“I dreamt last night . . . that . . . he stepped out of the water. And— if that wasn’t shocking enough, he . . .” </p><p>But he faltered. Safely lost in a dream.</p><p>After a long while, she said in a clear, ringing tone. “Contrary to what you might believe, I can’t actually read your mind, Bucky.”</p><p>This time he didn’t bother looking at her, hating when she used that tone. Talked to him like his Ma would whenever he walked into the kitchen being evasive. Yeah, he got the irony of she being the very reason he could remember what that felt like, still he knew she only used it to get his attention. That indisputable <i>“find yer balls, Bucky, say whatcha gotta say or get outta my kitchen, yer Pa’s expecting dinner,”</i> tone.</p><p>She kept her face raptly up at the moss sunlight, imperturbable patience shimmering around her like a heat wave. He shifted position. Moved over closer to her, perpendicular to her right, where there was an alcove, a little more hidden, more away from the vast open fields of the Cavern. But also just to be closer to her. He wore no robes that morning but wished he had, wanting to wrap himself as he spoke. Instead it was just him in T-shirt and cargoes. He slipped his hand into his sling,  lowered his head.</p><p>And so skimming and skipping, in as much an effort to control his skimming, skipping heart, he told her about the continued void that his subconscious still chose to live in, of the spheres stopping on their own, of Steve stepping out of that — water prison — and suddenly being there in front of him.</p><p>“I don’t mean like in a dream. I mean as you and I are now. As real. And he smiled at me in a way I haven’t known since we were in the war. Back when he used to—” He stopped, his words just having seemed to pack up. His heart was going like it was being hunted. Swamped with confusion and fear, too many emotions, he felt it would be better to shut down. If he could just shut down for a day, just for a little while . . . </p><p>
  <i>“No, Bucky, you have come to us and will keep you safe.”</i>
</p><p>He nodded, not sure he hadn’t just heard it in his head, but knowing he was. Safe with her, safe with the Women who had loved and cared for him when he could never have explained to anyone what it felt like to be inside his head. Safe to say anything no matter how little sense it made. <i>You will come to us and we will keep you safe.</i> It was a promise of healing. </p><p>“Start by finishing your thought,” she said gently.</p><p>And so, sighing, he rested his head against the rock wall, centering himself. Settling into his morning therapy, cooperating in the only thing required of him for this part, being to speak his thoughts freely.</p><p>“He used to smile at me like that in the war. Looking dead at me, smiling as though it was perfectly normal to give anyone those kinds of looks without . . . the promise of anything more.” </p><p>Closing his eyes, he pushed air out of his lungs. Wow. Thoughts he had never expressed aloud. He could hardly believe the simply relief of it.</p><p>“That particular smile of Steve’s is like getting pole-axed. Eight months ago, even half dead inside, it was still something I could recognize. But during the war . . . Well, I got over it, anyway,” he said, forcing those words out as well. “Made myself. Because he was different after his transformation, you see. And it was my privilege—” and after a point an outright pleasure— “to witness. All the astonishing things that were inside him, pouring out. His strength, sense of moral justice, his fierce loyalty. I spent the war in nothing short of awe. Because . . . I never believed in God, or gods. I know how that sounds, especially here where the Ancestors live. But out there, then? I just knew about the hard knocks and looking out for your people. But suddenly, there was this . . . god. And not just any, but Steve. <i>My</i> Steve.” He snorted, shook his head. “You can’t understand. Can’t imagine.”</p><p>He stared at the far side of the Cavern, seeing not the quietly working and singing Women, but the world inside his head.</p><p>“When he felt he had found himself completely, I found, much to my surprise, that I <i>had</i> a god. And I believed in him completely. He was—” Sighing, he said, “I saw strange things in war. Things that made you question this thing called reality. What it truly was, whose was actually true. But what happened to my love for him was strangest of all. It seemed to have no dimension, coming from the past, ripping up my present, and bringing things from a future world I wasn’t equipped to deal with. I’m a guy from Brooklyn and it’s hard these days to get across just how ordinary it meant in those days.” He couldn’t help laughing a little with memories aggressively washing through him. “So for me, my experience in love was the strangest of all. And, oh God,” he said, his voice slipping in pitch, “did I love Steve Rogers.”</p><p>God, what was he doing. Why was he saying things that couldn’t be unsaid. Things that had remained safe inside him for so long . . . </p><p>In a different world, he had accepted their lives. Fully and completely. And had figured out how he would survive it. Just like all the men and women like him of his time. A way he could still have him, a solution he believed would have worked.</p><p>But here came another world. Another lifetime. One, it seemed, of all possibilities, including the one he had thought impossible. So it was cruel, laughable if reality had called his bluff and asked him to go ahead and do it, reach for the stars. And it turned out his entire life he had just been living in a fantasy.</p><p>That even in the best version of reality, he could not have Steve.</p><p>For him it would have been better to not have been given the choice at all. Because the fact was that he didn’t know what Steve wanted. And at least in their previous lives, hope undisturbed could live eternal. </p><p>He couldn’t seem to speak anymore. He felt as though he had lost all faith in himself . . . </p><p>Luma leaned forward, her dark, gleaming hand extended and feeling toward a small cluster of fluorescent fuchsia, bell-headed, fungi. As though he wasn’t there and she was more interested in the plants, she tapped on them. He could swear they began trilling. Like tiny, comforting bells, all at once. The sound didn’t last long. He looked darkly from the fungi to her, unsure of what had just happened. But she was back in her usual position, contemplative at the closed sky. </p><p>And lowering his own gaze to the golden heather looking carpet around him in the alcove, he frowned momentarily, wondering why he’d stopped talking. Why he was looking at fungi when there was so much he desperately wanted her to know.</p><p>“Steve has always lived in a world of his own,” he explained to her. “I knew that only too well. I knew that intimately. And I have accepted it. So when he started . . . <i>shining</i> at me, in a world war no less, believe I wasn’t going to be the one to dull it. Nothing in me could have permitted that. I was the happiest person alive for him. Happier even than himself. And— I’m not saying it was easy because— because it—”</p><p>But now he did stop himself. Cold.</p><p>Not because of Luma. Not because he wasn’t safe, or because he couldn’t get the words out. But because of the boy he had once been. The one whom since waking he had implicitly understood he needed to protect. An innocent bystander in all of this. Nothing and no one would make him talk about that. Not even if Steve himself asked. Because that was a whole other thing, from a whole other world.</p><p>And as the subject himself had assured him, <i>that</i> was permanently gone.</p><p>Head tipped, face turned upward, Luma seemed enraptured. She had opened her eyes. They were alabaster. “You don’t have to,” she said softly, and he was nodding, thanking her, before realizing he hadn’t said a word and what was she talking about. “That’s not for me, anyway,” she added. And he looked at her and vaguely asked, “What?”</p><p>“Continue, Bucky,” she said tranquilly. “Your experience with Steve in the war culminated last night in a dream in which he was smiling at you the same way he used to, in the war.”</p><p>He blinked at her. And she who couldn’t see his surprise, laughed softly. “Yes, Bucky, I <i>listen.</i>”</p><p>“Yeah, but only because apparently, I stink so much you’re forced to.”</p><p>She laughed. “Not <i>so</i> much.”</p><p>Then silence wafted down, like gossamer. And pain flared in his heart. “I used to be different in the war. I was <i>his</i> Bucky. All my life. But now I’m nothing but a walking wreck. Having to relearn where feelings are supposed to go. This isn’t who I am. I’m the one who’s older and level headed and cares for him. And that was a hard won struggle for me in the war. So now I’m truly worthless to him. All these months you’ve been trying to make me talk about him, well here it is. I’m useless.”</p><p>“But in your dream,” she encouraged, gently.</p><p>“It was just a dream,” he said defiantly, lying, losing steam even as he spoke. “He just showed up and said . . .  ‘I can see you.’ Just like that. He took my hand and it was like— healing, I suppose,” he finished quietly. “Then he just came closer . . . and touched me . . .” he stopped. Lifted careful eyes at her. “And I woke up.” </p><p>“And masturbated to your heart’s content,” she finished with a soft, grand flourish.</p><p>He killed a sigh. Eight months of this.</p><p>“After which you checked your messages, and felt that something was different. Yes, so he touched and sexed you up,” and he made a hapless face at her old woman attempt at slang. “But what was different about the dream? You dream about him all the time, coming in here always smelling like him. What was different this time.”</p><p>He eyed her. “You tell me. You’re the one saying I smell different this morning. Never mind that you don’t actually know what he smells like. Second, if I do dream about him all the time and come in here smelling like him all the time, then how—”</p><p>“Bucky.”</p><p>She had reached her right hand out and closed it around his knee. Dark and gleaming in the sunlight, it rested there. And she had spoken in the kindest, gentlest tones he had ever heard from her. And suddenly, looking down at her hand, he was struggling not to cry.</p><p>There <i>had</i> been something in Steve’s voice, and he wasn’t ready . . . </p><p>“I’m your healer and responsible for you. This is a different type of dream and I’m aware of that. Which is why it’s always better that I make the jokes and create the diversions and you pay attention. So pay attention. Stay focused. And answer my question. Why is this dream different?”</p><p>He shook his head, at himself, at her. “You know I haven’t been able to touch those things in months.”</p><p>“Which has caused your aversion to touch. Neither offering nor accepting from anyone. Not even from those who wish to give of it freely, caringly, for you have many admirers in the kingdom of the Panthers. Not once since awakening have you wanted to participate in one of the most important gifts of the natural world, the gift of touch, and so resisting your last barrier to complete reintegration. Resisting unless and until you might have it with him.”</p><p>He wasn’t looking at her.</p><p>“We of the Wariza are here are to serve as a repository of memory, and when you began to make real progress was when you decided to lock him away. Afraid of what that progress might mean for your future with him. Now without wars, with no others, nothing between you. Feeling exposed and vulnerable, you therefore created your water barriers in which you successfully imprisoned him and everything to do with him. Kept him locked away until you felt ready. But now,” she said. “It appears he rejects your timetable.”</p><p>“He doesn’t know anything about it.”</p><p>“He has emerged all on his own,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken, sounding contemplative. “Without need of your permission and with no regard of your most sacred insecurity.” She paused. “An interesting individual, I think.”</p><p>Then she fell silent completely, and for a long time seemed distracted. And when she spoke again, it was as if she had been having entirely unrelated thoughts.</p><p>“What, I wonder, is his message.”</p><p>He glanced at her, bewildered. “I’d say he delivered it.”</p><p>“That he can see you?” she asked, tsking and making a dismissive gesture. “That’s not a message, Bucky. That’s a love tap.”</p><p>He closed his eyes.</p><p>Slowly, she withdraw her hand. </p><p>“But it seems he has indeed brought us all to the end of the road. Inconsiderate of him, maybe, but consistent with how you have described him.”</p><p>And for what could have been a whole hour, she was silent. Head against the rock, he had turned it slightly to listen to the soft singing, choruses rising in the Cavern. And his mind began wandering, imagining she was taking him on walks deeper into the interior, into the interconnected realms beyond this entrance cavern, which she had never, sternly informing him that those were for deep subconscious spaces and he was still tripping all over the surface of things. But he wanted to know deeper things. Maybe he was ready for those. Maybe they were actually easier than the surface of things . . . </p><p>When she spoke again, she sounded so serious that he knew he was going to need the invocation of protection he could recognize by now on hearing it.</p><p>“All these months we’ve been absorbing your pain. Weaving your healing with protection and safety. Giving you space and time, or neither if you so needed. Space away from the commotion of the world. Time for refection. All so you could see who you really are, what you have been, and the damage you have caused to innocence and evil alike. You have shown strength, and you will continue to do so.”</p><p>She paused, spoke gently.</p><p>“It’s time, Bucky.”</p><p>“For what,” he asked hoarsely, his head against the rock and his eyes closed, still seeing the shine and glow of the Cavern. Knowing there was no running.</p><p>“For you to face what you fear the most.”</p><p>They were like words he had waited a lifetime to hear. Still it took a truly long time before he settled on hearing, much less accepting what she had said.</p><p>“He no longer exists,” he weakly said. “Shuri got rid of him. And I can confirm it.”</p><p>“Yet you chose to lock Steve away and never once replied to any of his messages.”</p><p>He squeezed his shut eyes, feeling hot tears leaking from them. He would rather be in the war than face this. He had never signed up to be a monstrosity. He wanted only to return home to all of them, to <i>him,</i> a proud solider.</p><p>“Bucky,” she softly said, encircling a hand around his sling. His residual limb responded to her touch through the cloth, warming unexpectedly.</p><p>“Bucky,” she repeated, like she was his Ma waking him up. “It’s over.”</p><p>“What is,” he croaked, knowing full well what but wanting to hear it from her.</p><p>“Your healing.”</p><p>“I’m not ready,” he insisted. “I’m not . . . <i>mori,</i> I’m not . . . I’m not ready . . .” and finally, he lost it. Tears burned from his eyes as he continued shaking his head trying to hold himself together, and she pulled him into her arms. He went, setting his head to her softly beating heart. And cried until it hurt even to do so.</p><p>“Only,” she said, sighing deeply. “I’m very sorry to tell you that this next step, you must take on your own.”</p><p>“What step?” he asked, gasping as he pulled back, trying to regain some control of himself.</p><p>“Prepare yourself, Bucky. It’s time to fight.”</p><p>“Fight for what?”</p><p>“Your future. What else?”</p><p>—</p><p>Home that evening, it was to the sight of Brooklyn and Dodger curled up asleep on his doorstep, tired of waiting for his return.</p><p>At his neighbors returning from their neighborhood nightly tales, sleeping children in their arms, he raised a slow hand in greeting.</p><p>Continuing to the east side of his cottage where the pens were, he closed the gates and did a headcount. Confirmed that his herd were all present and accounted for. All the mothers, fathers, and babies that were his responsibility. His dairy platoon. In moments, Brooklyn and Dodger trotted up, glancing up at him before scuffing at the grass in front of the little gate. They never slept locked inside, wanting to be free, he supposed, to go rescue him in case of anything. Carry him out of his house like a pair of firefighters maybe. Inside the pens, he emptied their water troughs, checked their feed buckets against the morning . . . and let his mind run wherever it felt it needed to.</p><p>After their morning sessions Luma always made him stay and join her and the rest of the Wariza in harvesting their fairy dust. And that morning after coming apart like that, she wouldn’t have let him out of her sight if the earth itself opened up and attempted to swallow him. So he’d stayed close as they had worked. He was the only person being healed as far as he could see, so he worked with all of them interchangeably. Although in recent months, he was continually caught in a feel that the Wariza were preparing ever more spaces like the one Luma had for him. Nothing overt among their fungi that he could see, nothing explicit. Yet he got the feeling that the work they were focused on at the moment, himself included, entailed creating ever more spaces of healing.</p><p>Of his own healing, however, Luma had said nothing more. Prod as he might. Only occasionally hugging herself and swaying in imitation of a waltz when he sent looks at her — her impression of him and Steve in an embrace. So he’d left it. He was just meant to know what she meant in saying that it was time to fight.</p><p>Finished outside, he tapped on his security lights. It was funny, thinking of security in this place. But they made each cottage do it, and after months he suspected just because it looked very pretty at night. His lights were a kind of pine-ish orange. At his front stoop, he bent and scratched at the ears of the sleeping couple there, who twitched them like flicking off flies. Smiling, he stepped over their sleeping forms and entered his home. And not much later, he was seated on the side table, the communicator between his thighs, listening once more to Steve’s message.</p><p>But, as baffled as in the morning, he watched the dome darken. There was simply no way to guess, much less know, what had happened. What had triggered all of this.</p><p>Nervous, he got up and entered his bedroom, picking up a missed cushion from that morning’s clean up as he got ready for bed. He wasn’t comforted that Luma felt that the darkness still lived. Nor that she hadn’t simply outright said, <i>“Call him and ask him what he meant.”</i> That was after all the simple and direct answer to the matter. That she hadn’t told him to do was wasn’t great. But what he hated most of all was the expectation that he had to fight this alone. No one should have to fight alone.</p><p>But it was nervous excitement too, because it had indeed happened. Otherwise she would have told him he was imagining things. Best of all, whatever it was, she felt it was a good thing.</p><p>Lying in bed shortly afterward, he watched the stars through his open shutters, thinking of him. Somewhere out there, up there, still fucking it up. Thinking of the last time he’d felt whole with him — the morning of their Hydra train assault, the morning of his fall. How he’d by then become used to that new body, pleased that it was the same sweet smile, the same canny eyes. Thrilled nearly mindless at the new brand of confidence, hardly believing they were together again. The odds of that. Thinking and hoping so many things for after the war, after the things he had seen, hopeful for future in which all things were possible. And then darkness. Long and terrible, and so confusing. Hadn’t be been there already, and hadn’t Steve rescued him. And then a depression void of fifty years of existence, opening and closing his eyes, then opening a final time to the only time that mattered — when he’d had oblivion pounded out of him on a Helicarrier, courtesy of none other than his guy himself. Then the suspended world he had endured as life itself for two years, when there had been no shutting down, no going to sleep against the dark in his head. Aware of so much missing from his mind but unsure what. Then . . . at last . . . to the shining difference of eight months ago. Among his warmest, most precious memories. Memories he returned to almost daily, if not for entire days living in those five days. Enjoying those lovely trickles. Struggling back then to understand, but knowing there was no understanding, only holding to the love they had for each other.</p><p>In the heavens, the stars twinkled at him through his open windows. Fall in East Africa was upon them, and, his neighbors told him, there would be daily showers. “Just around noon,” Citu told him. “And everything will turn even greener.” He looked forward to it.</p><p>He <i>had</i> come a long way. And if Luma said his healing was over, he believed her. She was magic after all. And if she said it was time to fight for his future . . . He sighed. Then he would find a way.</p><p>All told, for the first time in years, he felt optimistic. No matter that the day had shredded his dignity, never mind his heart, it had felt immensely good to get it all out. Steve Rogers had been eating him alive since he was in second grade. It was liberation to say, even if he hadn’t gone into detail, a hundred percent freedom to tell someone he loved him. And how much. One day, before she had to forget him, he hoped to be able to show her in whatever way he could how much he loved Steve. He didn’t know in what way exactly, but he felt somehow she’d get a kick out of it.s</p><p>Things were about to different, he realized, falling asleep. Different, and better. And that was a good thing. And smiling, he closed his eyes and was soon asleep.</p><p>Only to be met by the Assassin.</p><p>—</p><p>It was dark everywhere. The darkness was his realm. So this was fitting.</p><p>There was chaos, and he had caused it. Darkness and the singular orientation of chaos. Screams, cries, the trembling fear that shook the air. All pointing like arrows to the location of his target. He was home. Nothing operated more effectively than fear, the vapor it sent into the air like a three dimensional map, targets lighted like pinpoints of light. And when they saw him, they feared. For if he was, they were no longer. He was the embodiment of no future. He was woken for no other purpose but that.</p><p>And he had been awoken.</p><p>Started awake, his breath was frozen in the darkness. Through his open shutters the stars winked and shone brightly.</p><p>Slowly pushing aside the covers, he sat up on the edge of his bed. Shakily, he stood up. Inside his kitchen, he drank some water. Set the cup down, almost smashing the clay against the counter. He wasn’t ready. He’d told her he wasn’t. Head down, he wrapped his arm around himself, holding himself, shaking as though he were malfunctioning. Never had he wanted so much to be home in Brooklyn and be with Steve. </p><p>He’d said he wasn’t ready. </p><p>Time passed slowly, only him and his short, shallow breathing in his house. When it calmed, slowed, he turned back out of his kitchen.</p><p>Got back into bed. And a new dream had begun.</p><p>A democratic election and usurped elections. A president in exile, now a broken body. They had thought to hide him behind an army of bodyguards and dogs, metal detectors and powerful arms. A mansion atop a green hill, a resort town below. That in such a location, he would not operate. For they had known he was coming. Yet they were always surprised when they saw him. Send a message, had been his instructions. End all hope. He had done so with body parts.</p><p>Now the world changed and it was carnage. A bomb blast. A quick sweep, judging by limbs, showed him fifty dead, a street corner once holding a cafe now holding a dust cloud, powdered plaster, fallen concrete, slowly crawling survivors. They were still in shock. The screams would come shortly. But he moved with determination toward the back. The bomb was just a distraction, to smoke out the emergency evacuation route of the target — and there they were, through the back, moving fast with the target’s head shoved down. He had been tracking them for days, watching for patterns. But opportunity given, the easiest way was always the most direct. The target’s security gave a shout on seeing him, bullets flying, but they were panicked, and any projectiles which didn’t miss him struck off his arm with hard glints that put the fear of death in them. He had his SIG-Sauer in hand, and he put two bullets in each of their eye sockets before they could draw breath. Four former Green Berets fell. The target screamed and fell to his knees: “I have a family, I have a wife and kids! Please, please!” A poet, a writer, a speaker against, this one was. He shot him point blank through the larynx. Then as the body dropped, he knelt and reached his left hand into the target’s mouth, finding his tongue. He had been given very specific instructions.</p><p>He shook himself until he was forced awake.</p><p>And laid there crying. It was morning, thank God.</p><p>But for hours he didn’t get out bed. Just laid there with his eyes half closed, his mind numb.</p><p>When the sun was high over the horizon he got out of bed, just to stop Brooklyn and Dodger from head butting his door down. All day while he tended the rest of his herd, they followed him around, accusatory but understanding looks as though trying to let him know he wasn’t, at this crux, being judged. </p><p>Until mid afternoon when he could no longer mentally locomote himself and could be found sitting on the hillside in his backyard. </p><p>Stroking and hand feeding an old member of his herd, he watched the old goat with its head on his thigh. On its last legs and happy to let Bucky Barnes take care of him.</p><p>He felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, and in anyone else, he would have recognized a body in shock. But his was a body which would function through just about anything. So he wasn’t in shock. He wasn’t in anything. Only his heart would feel this pain.</p><p>So he hadn’t started out strong. But he could try again.</p><p>Night came slowly that first day. All day he worked on his homestead and at the artisan shops in which he apprenticed for furniture making and earthenware.</p><p>But night still came.</p><p>Lying on his side, he slowly pulled the bed-cloths over him, thinking of him. How he loved him, missed him, the feel of his arms around him. What cherished things he would say to him now without a society, a world in the way. Drowning in his need for him.</p><p>It didn’t keep slaughter at bay.</p><p>A new target. A young woman this time, the college age daughter of a defected Mideast royal family. Instruction not to send a message to the family, but to her country itself. She was curious, bemused when he was suddenly at the end of the hallway of her dormitory. Her family had been targets for generations, fear had been bred out of her. If she saw something out of the ordinary, she was to assess it, determine whether to apply her own skills of self-protection. But she was dead before she had a moment for an assessment. They had trained her for humans. Not the end of all hope. Her chest caved. Her funeral, he thought, would be closed casket. Then there would be no more talk of diplomacy as her country prepared for war with its neighbor.</p><p>Weeping, he woke, sat on the edge of his bed, rocking. He was trying, he was trying.</p><p>The Super Soldier serum he had been enhanced with was not like Steve’s. Arnim Zola’s formula, by design, had been to deaden his emotions, not enhance them. Neither with the aim nor chemical composition to replicate Dr. Erskine’s. He was built for speed, physical strength and precision. For an enhanced mind that worked with lightning acuity for the sole purpose of execution and survival. He was built for missions. Not for embracing human emotions. Or understanding. Those things were the same in him as anyone else. As much as he’d had going into war. And it wasn’t enough for this greater evil. </p><p>His heart and body no longer matched. </p><p>He was supposed to be fighting, but he had nothing.</p><p>Next day was a healing day, and hooded, he journeyed to Luma and cried in her arms. He told her he didn’t know what he was doing, <i>what</i> he was supposed to be doing. “Keep fighting.” He tried to make her hear he wasn’t doing any such thing, and she told him to keep at it.</p><p>In the dead of night, that night, he shaking, trying to wake himself up, but he couldn’t so, he was crying, tied to the sickening feel of pulverized human flesh. The sound of bone breaking so easily. Skulls shattering under his elbow. The conclusions of dying bodies as he ripped parts for proof of malicious intent. Always, he was given specific instructions.</p><p>Only when the dream was finished with him did it let him wake, pushing him nearly over the side of his bed with a retching, gasping couch, thinking he was going to vomit but nothing came. And trying to bury his tears, his cries, he slid from the bed, sat on the floor and bent his head, weeping. Was he failing? Did he just not know how to do it, and so undoing everything Luma, the Wariza had spent months healing? They’d gotten rid of these nightmares many months ago from his waking hours — but here he was at night, opening himself up as if nothing had changed, as though he was back at his first months.</p><p>If this was about fear of a future in which he might have to let Steve go, then maybe this was happening because he was being selfish. Maybe this was about acceptance. He was a living miracle by any standard, even there in Wakanda, healed of gross mental trauma. Maybe it was greed to want everything. Maybe this was his punishment.</p><p>Before dawn he dragged himself from his house. It was still dark outside as he hurtled into the hovercraft. And remembered next to nothing until the plunge into the Waters, where, the funnel sucking him down, stopping, opening his eyes, he began his swim. When he dragged himself through the entrance of the Cavern, he had no idea what state he was in. Wordlessly, the Women came to him, ushering him toward his healing place. But Luma wasn’t at their rock wall. So he crawled into the alcove, laid down and fell asleep.</p><p>“Bucky,” she cried softly, when she came. But he refused to leave. Citu would tend his herd he told her around a throat that might as well have been filled with gravel. Shuri would know where he was. He wasn’t expecting any messages from Steve, who by now should be on a three-day mission into Belarus. She needed to stop, he wasn’t going anywhere. Done talking, he simply laid there facing the wall, eyes shut and unable to open. He wanted her to see just how much he was not fighting, for her to understand.</p><p>“Bucky, you can’t fight from here.” </p><p>“I don’t care.”</p><p>“You must do this on your own.”</p><p>He refused to answer. Couldn’t even if he tried.</p><p>Her hand gently closed over his sling. Then he heard her leaving the alcove. About the size of a bathroom, the space would do him fine.</p><p>So he stayed, even though it was no better. He hadn’t known what he had expected coming to her, only that he couldn’t do this alone. During the day he sat blearily at the foot of the mountain, staring dazedly at the swirling onyx indigo sky, seeing patterns and hearing messages that perhaps were not there. Or he sat with his back against rocks on the Shores, listening to their songs, staring sightlessly at their intricate rituals, trying not to see shadows in the trees, his memories mocking him all the while. Telling him this was all he was ever going to have. Fear and heartache. That he wished that Steve’s message had been that he loved him in return and that once he was awake he would drop everything and come and lock him in his arms as he did in his dreams. Whispering everything. All the things his fear and limited imagination could not.</p><p>And at nights he was pulverized himself. He begged them for sleep tonics, magic potions, anything. But they told him it would only make the dreams worse. And he laughed in their faces. </p><p>“What?” he asked, breathless, disbelieving of what he was hearing. “What . . .?” </p><p>At night she came in to hold him when he woke crying.</p><p>“Bucky . . .” she insisted kindly.</p><p>“Why am I so afraid?” he cried into her robes, hardly recognizing his own voice. “Why do I feel that I’ve already lost? That I’m gonna lose no matter what I do. Even now, in this— new life— in this brand new world. How are we together if not to be together. Why do I feel that I’m going to lose him and this time it’ll be forever . . .”</p><p>“All fear comes from something, Bucky. And the unusual nature of your lives makes this fear of yours not at all irrational.” She gently squeezed his shoulder. “But fear should never stop what has to be done. You know that, as a soldier who has been in war.”</p><p>“But this feels different. This feels real, as if I’m experiencing it right now, that he’s gone . . . and I never once told him how much I loved him. I didn’t even tell him that I loved him. How stupid is that? How— how can anyone go around thinking that they have all the time in the world. After <i>our</i> lives? I should have told him. Why didn’t I tell him. I can feel him gone . . . how much it hurts . . . and it’s burning my heart . . .”</p><p>“Well, you’re in a cave of magic. So . . .” she sighed. “Yes, it’s going to hurt much more.” And she sighed again, as though holding back things she didn’t wish to tell him.</p><p>“Take me to the Interiors,” he demanded. “I wanna know what’s there. Whatever it is, I’ll deal with it.”</p><p>She sighed.</p><p>And on the third night, “Maybe you should call him after all. Ask him what has happened, for your peace of mind.”</p><p>“I can’t . . . I won’t do it. The last thing I want is for Steve to see me like this.”</p><p>“Then <i>fight,</i> Bucky.”</p><p>“Bucky,” she said on the fourth night, tutting while gently massaging his scalp, “you're interrupting my sleep . . .”</p><p>And on the morning of the fifth day he woke to find himself not on the Cavern floor, not on the Shores, but on the Upper Shores, by the Waters at the bottom of the ravine. So he scaled the cliff back up to the summit, and trudged through the forest, waited for the maglev and took himself back home.</p><p>—</p><p>Gasping, seated on the floor, he wiped his eyes. After a while, he fell into a kind of daze, a limbo between sleep and waking. Until even that became impossible to sustain. Slowly pushing to his feet, and went into his living room.</p><p>There, moonlight beaming across the colors, he picked up his communicator and made his way back to bed. Got in, placing the dome beside him, and pulled up the bed-cloths. With a quiet, watery sigh, he placed his palm on it, watching as it became translucent so that he could see to the bottom of it. Now he could see all of Steve’s messages. Small rectangles of text with date stamps. He selected some at random from months back and closed his eyes. </p><p><i>“Buck,”</i> his sweet voice began, <i>“you remember the time in Austria when we found that fortress in the mountains that was just basically a castle full of food? Well, guess what? It’s still there! No one’s touched it since the War, just kinda got forgotten. All the crates, the rations, covered in dust. Crazy, right? We would’a eaten ourselves to death if Colonel Philips hadn’t chased us outta there.”</i></p><p>His breathing settled as he closed his eyes. <i>We sure would’ve . . . </i></p><p>With his voice filling up his bedroom, he fell asleep.</p><p>If he struck the target from this angle, the blood spray against the headboard would fan in a forty-five degree angle. It didn’t matter, target would be dead, from a sniper’s shot, but the angle would send his pursuers running in the opposite direction from where he’d executed the hit. He’d since chambered the round. Laser point on sleeping World Bank official. He was listening to the low exchange between his handlers. Waiting for his signal to pull the trigger. Sometimes missions were called off last minute, for reasons only they could understand. Go or stay, he only awaited instruction. Mission was accomplished when their objective, whatever for the moment, was met. Listening to the crowded night streets of Prague below, he heard nothing. Saw nothing except the sleeping skull magnified by his scope, the one of the wife to the left not being a target. But he was prepared always. She might shift and he might have to shoot twice. But here it came, his handlers were resolving.</p><p>“<i>Bucky.</i>”</p><p>Startled, he turned and looked over his shoulder from the edge of the roof. And there stood the Captain.</p><p>Shield across his back. Towering over him. “This isn’t you.”</p><p>Hand extending, reaching down toward him. “Take my hand . . . and stand up. Let’s end this.”</p><p>Without a word he spun at him, leg extended and intending on clearing his foe’s feet from under him. The Captain leapt into the air — he saw it in slow motion, one foot, then the other, suspended long enough to raise his gaze to him, then reach forward to lock a fist into the front of his uniform, knuckles cutting off his air supply. Fist in his Kevlar, the Captain pulled him with him as he fell, not landing but falling. So that they were rolling together across the concrete roof. </p><p>And when they stopped he was on top of his foe.</p><p>Tried then to bolt. But the Captain held him immobile. Tried to hit him straight in the face. But the Captain easily turned, landing his metal fist in the concrete and cracking it. Tried then to flee. But the Captain turned swiftly and had now turned them over. Was now on top of him, staring down. Pulling off his his hood, it sat on his shoulders, the Captain’s blazing eyes, panting face was now over him. “It’s me, Bucky,” the Captain whispered, fiercely. “It’s me.” </p><p>Then shocking him even further, lowered his head close, staring at him as though not just the dreamer but the one being dreamed about were losing their minds. “Bucky, it’s <i>me.</i>”</p><p>His eyes flew open. </p><p>His room was dark, silent. </p><p>He sat up and looked around. Pale moonlight washed in, painting over the colors in here. But the small room was empty. Just him. And looking down, the dome against his stomach was dark, partially hidden under the covers, which were down around his waist.</p><p>Speechless, unmoving, he remained staring into the dark room, trying to comprehend a dream so vivid it seemed impossible he wouldn’t see a shield across a broad back if he just waited, staring long enough into the dark room.</p><p>He fell back on his back, his heart going like a jackhammer. Then, instinctively, he closed his eyes. And began counting backward from one hundred. He was at ninety-nine.</p><p>They stood many meters apart. His rifle strapped at his back, his foe’s a shield, same.</p><p>“Let him go,” the Captain called.</p><p>The Captain spoke in imperatives. To he who was <i>was</i> imperative. They did not face each other. He was with his eyes on his target, a figure outlined in bright light moving across the dark landscape of his mind, while the Captain stood his distance to his right, feet apart, ready to try and stop him.</p><p>“Let who go,” he asked, not raising his voice, not looking at him. “The one whose mind and body and very skills I use? How can I, when I’m him?”</p><p>“You’re not Bucky. I don’t know who you are. But you need to let him go.”</p><p>“Or what?”</p><p>“Or I’ll kill you.”</p><p>Inside his bedroom, he opened his eyes.</p><p>—</p><p>“Ah,” said Luma, sounding in actual wonder. “But not alone, after all. A fine message.”</p><p>It wasn’t a healing day but he had hauled himself to her so early, the sun was still trying to rise when he dove headfirst into the Waters, absolutely hating how hard they made it to get to them.</p><p>She was on a circle of the mountain ziggurat, gathering plants. “The one who loves you rises as your champion.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“You have chosen a champion. The one to fight for you.”</p><p>“But— I thought you said this was a step I had to take alone. That only I could deal with it.”</p><p>“And you are. Admirably, I should add.”</p><p>“I don’t understand.”</p><p>“Bucky, you’re afraid. Of this step, you most certainly are. You don’t trust yourself. And that’s okay, even the bravest of us needs extra love sometimes.”</p><p>He glanced sharply at her, telling himself he must have told her the phrase Steve used all the time when he tidied him up during the war.</p><p>“But you are afraid. And from an abundance of indication, he is not.”</p><p>He simply sat down on the stone steps. “This — this is crazy.”</p><p>“I think it’s kind of sweet,” she said, sitting down beside him. “And certainly interesting.”</p><p>Reaching into her robe, she took out paper-wrapped dope. Took out a butane lighter, lit it up and put the lighter back into the folds. Her robes were purple that morning. <i>Actually,</i> he heard, completely unbidden, <i>Violet.</i> She took a long inhale of the leaf. Held it deep in her lungs, then blew it out. He sent her a sideways look. When he had first started going there and seen the rather unusual sight of these women and their leaf, he had asked her whether he needed to smoke up as well, whether it was how he’d get his mind opened for therapy or whatever. She’d told him flatly no. That if he wanted to hang around all day smoking with them, he’d have to get healed first. “It’ a privilege, not an entitlement,” she’d told him.</p><p>But he’d been with her long enough to know when she was teasing. And without question, while the Women might not say it, the smoke from that leaf had affected his mind. Relaxed him more. Made him more accepting of their counseling, of their near drowning him in the Waters ever so often, and of listening to their long, winding sermons and songs, and actually understanding. Not to mention their chiming fungi . . . </p><p>Now he wondered whether she was doing something even now to have raised . . . what was happening. Maybe all of this was his imagination — a horny dream fired by severe drought and second-handing too much dope . . . and now he was having the mother of all highs.</p><p>“You have bonded with him,” she said, still sounding more fascinated than he had ever heard her. “Powerful magic exists between you. Did you speak any words of magic to him? Words of incantation which formed this bond.”</p><p>“No, because I don’t know magic.”</p><p>“Think, Bucky.”</p><p>“I don’t have to, lady. I don’t know magic.”</p><p>Luma refused to speak any longer, petulantly looking away from him. </p><p>Soon he realized he wasn’t going to speak to him again until he followed her admonition to “think.” Okay, perhaps they were just misunderstanding each other. There had to be a first time for everything. Maybe whatever means means they used to break the language barrier had nothing in English for what she was saying besides words like incantation and magic.</p><p>“Help me understand,” he said to her. “A bond existing because . . . I might have said something to him.”</p><p>“You did say something to him. Obviously.” </p><p>He nodded, moving her along with a gesture. “Such as?” he encouraged when she still didn’t continue. “Gimme an example.”</p><p>She looked away, slowly tipping her head this way and that, as though enjoying a melody only she could hear. “Ah,” she said. “Such a thing as, I give myself to you. All of me, to all of you. For all time. Or in this life, it doesn’t really matter which you used.”</p><p>Well, he’d been shaking his head since she’d started, never mind the corny expressions. “No, and I think I’d remember.”</p><p>“Think.”</p><p>Sitting back, he killed the biggest sigh he’d ever felt since leaving Brooklyn. And turning away, he kept his face averted so she wouldn’t sense his over-this-hell attitude. “Maybe it’s the . . . hallucinogens,” he said delicately, eyeing the surrounding, glowing stash.</p><p>“Maybe it’s the hallucinogens,” she mumbled in a dumbed-down, deepened voice, imitating him. Ignoring the look he sent her way, which she surely felt, she said, “Or maybe it’s something you said which has bonded you for life.”</p><p>“Let’s say I did say something that could have such an effect,” he said for the sake of getting to an answer. “Why would it have such an effect. Wouldn’t I need actual magical powers to make magical incantations work?”</p><p>“Everyone has magical powers,” she said matter-of-factly. “Combined with the right words, said in an exact circumstance, and even the least magic will awaken and take hold.”</p><p>Then, turning, she opened her alabaster eyes at him, and they crinkled around the corners. “Well, either way, you certainly look much better today.”</p><p>“Thanks,” he muttered before catching himself. And then he just shook his head. She gripped his arm and squeezed reassuringly.</p><p>“Fight well, Bucky.”</p><p>That evening, he trifled around his house, pretending to repair light sources which didn’t need repairing, until he was no longer able to put off sleep. There was no need to bring his communicator — it had never left his bed. </p><p>In his bedroom, he stood staring at it, his heart beating. Then he got into bed, laying down on his side, with it next to his heart, pulled the covers over him, and closed his eyes.</p><p>—</p><p>The room was full of people. Everyone speaking at once. All but him. Watching from slitted eyes, watching from one to the other, not caring, decades past caring which of them he opened his eyes to see. Subzero air descended around him, more real than any of them, and the only thing worth his attention. The pain of the cold dissolved, replaced gradually with the heat of whatever year it was. Whatever time it was. Present, past, future from the last time. He only awaited instruction, because the emptiness of purpose was pain. Awoken to unfulfillment was pain. Their speech was annoying. Frustrating. Their manner of taking their time to reach conclusions he’d been awoken to fulfill. They were barely tolerable, their requirement that he sit and listen until they could resolve to the necessities. No matter that they thought themselves so efficient, still human and intolerably inefficient, taking time to explain what, how and where. He had not been made for this.</p><p>But behind them all, behind their heads, he saw a tall, straw-haired figure passing. Now in, now out of his vision. While they spoke in their perpetual cluster around him, his eyes followed the figure. Now here, then gone, behind the fixtures. The figure that was known. And would break all his efforts. The Captain sought to undo him. To take the core that was him. But <i>he</i> was Bucky. And he would allow no one to take that from him.</p><p>The Captain turned and stared prejudiced, personally offended eyes at him. And then burst like a star at him.</p><p>But he had been ready, and pushing from his stasis chamber, was already through the gathered bodies, through the warm room, through the steel doors and back out into the world.</p><p>The Captain gave chase, hard on his heels. If the Captain caught him, he would die, disappear forever. His life itself depended on an outrun, so he ran. Like gusts of wind they ran, equally matched, equally strong, equally in pursuit of a soul.</p><p>—</p><p><i>“Hey Buck,</i> another one from many months back, near the beginning. <i>So it’s been three days since my last message, and if I tell you the kinda crap I’m sniffin’ here, you wouldn’t believe. Remember how I told y’ ‘bout this whole Shield thing and how they’re not even supposed to exist, seeing as me, Sam and Maria Hill took ‘em down that day you pulled me from the water? And Alexander Pierce being dead and all? Well, tell that to Nick Fury. Christ, Buck, I tell ya. Nick is dreamin’. If Shield’s up then Hydra’s in here somewhere. I just feel it . . . Anyways, thinkin’ of you.  What, I gotta say that?</i> Steve laughed. <i>Get betta, Buck. Talk later.”</i></p><p>The Captain was thwarting his missions, preventing them before they started, and he was in pain. Unfulfilled mission was pain. A negation of his being, of his existence, and that could not be. And yet he could not escape him. There was anger, vicious anger in the Captain’s stare, and when they found themselves across a simple room from each other, the hate in the Captain’s eyes gave him pause, made him think. For he had been born out of a need to discover ways to destroy. And in the Captain’s gaze he saw something.</p><p>—</p><p>The Captain had a weakness. For reasons which were he made to laugh, he would laugh to know.</p><p>The Captain smelled of need. Want, desperation, desire. </p><p>Reaching for and grabbing him, his dread fear, the Captain could not keep hold of him. His grasp was weak and he easily pulled away, oftentimes simply dodging him. Again and again, then with the sudden understanding that the Captain feared harming the soul.</p><p>So when the Captain grabbed him, looking into his eyes, there seemed to be earth above and sky below, only to slacken his grip when did no more than look back, he sniffed the weakness of his foe — an ache for the one the Captain wished to save. So he found it easy to shake the Captain off. Sometimes reaching behind for his knives and slashing for his throat and making his foe drop back. Never reaching him, never destroying him. </p><p>And when he shook the Captain off he ran, in search of his next target.</p><p>—</p><p>Night after night it went, and it should have been getting better. But it was not. He was being ground to dust. A mental exhaustion like being in war. </p><p>Months of messages now resided in his brain. Missions, how SHIELD was still being shady, and so much more. Listening and falling asleep telling him he loved him, missed him. But he was failing. Making no progress. He was back to being of no use to Steve. </p><p>He needed badly to talk to Luma. Six days after the Women had dumped him on the Upper Shores, two weeks after the whole thing had begun, he was near mental. He had a healing day in another two, but on standing in his living room that night, knowing it would be another two before he saw her, he knew he couldn’t wait that long.</p><p>He could only think of Shuri to call.</p><p>Inside the palace there was a room where Shuri said he could communicate directly with the Wariza. </p><p>He was stunned. </p><p>“How badly do you need to talk to her?" Shuri whispered over their connection, even though neither of them should need to be whispering. </p><p>It was a quarter moon outside and the countryside was dark. All he wanted was to close his eyes . . . and not open them.</p><p>“Badly,” he slowly answered her.</p><p>So she told him to meet her at her bedroom balcony as soon as he could call down a hovercraft. </p><p>He was leaping onto her stone balcony in under five minutes.</p><p>Shuri took a look at him, pressed her lips tight, her eyes of sympathy. “You look wretched, Bucky," she said sadly, a little emotionally.</p><p>“Still better than on the inside.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he croaked.</p><p>She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a tight hug. Then pulling back, placing a finger to her lips to indicate that he be very quiet, she waved at him. They made their way through her dark bedroom to her door. Which she noiselessly opened, then they were both through.</p><p>Sneaking behind her through the hallways, he stayed a few paces back, giving enough space in case a guard sighted and he had to vanish. Still, he almost smiled to himself at the sight of her flaming orange pajamas, hair in two big knots, and feet in the glittery princess house slippers imaginable. If they weren’t caught on that alone, he might as well formally announce himself downstairs.</p><p>Turning into a short hallway, they reached a set of wide mahogany doors which she also silently opened to reveal what appeared to be the palace library.</p><p>“Aren’t there security cameras in here?” he whispered, stilled at the entrance.</p><p>“Let me worry about that in the morning.”</p><p>Along one wall was a row of what looked like wide, opaque telephone booths. </p><p>“In there," she whispered, bent toward him, but eyes on the booths. “Just place your palm on the terminal there and state whom you wish to speak to. Be specific, the directory is very fussy. I'll wait here."</p><p>He pointed at the booth. “Isn’t <i>this</i> monitored?”</p><p>“This is my mother’s library,” she whispered, sounded offended, even though there was no way in hell he could have known that, not the least because it half the size of his entire hamlet. “We don’t do surveillance on ourselves. Now hurry, before someone catches us.”</p><p>So he entered and found himself in a chamber. Black glass, a seating alcove built around the terminal. Black headsets hung above. Carefully putting on a headset, he sat on the ledge under the terminal, too strung out to even take the actual seat. Placing a hand on the screen, he asked in a tired, low voice for Luma of the Wariza. Before he had lifted his hand the terminal screen showed Connected. </p><p>“Hello, Bucky."</p><p>“Can you see me?” was the first dumb thing out of his mouth.</p><p>“No, I can’t,” she said, sounding bemused. “Why, are you naked?”</p><p>But he wasn’t. He shook his head. “What am I doing wrong?”</p><p>“You need to fight, Bucky.”</p><p>He was going to go crazy if he heard her say that again. “I am— he is. But I’m not helping, I don’t know how.”</p><p>“Find a way. This is a fight for your future, I think you know that big things are coming and you cannot lose this opening battle. The Assassin is pure fear, a sentinel at the gates, holding you back, keeping you locked where you are. Leave your fear behind, your feelings, his feelings, whatever you think they may be, for just one single night and join the fight. Trust in your future. Believe in your god.”</p><p>He nodded, trusting her. Believing her.</p><p>But he still failed. Night after night.</p><p>And then it had been eighteen days. Steve had sent a couple of new messages, sounding quiet still, but more like himself. Missions, daily life up there in the skies. </p><p>He listened without the capacity to understand. They existed in the same time but in different spaces. So they might as well be back to how they had been . . . him repeatedly awoken and used, Steve asleep under a continent of ice. What would he not give to bring them both, healthy, happy, themselves, into the same space . . . into the same time . . .</p><p>And at the Caverns he tended, pruned and harvested with Luma. </p><p>And at nights, too nervous to go to sleep, he left his house and spent the time with his neighbors, his fretting mom and pop goats in tow, at their small town square. Lying in a cushioned bamboo recliner, he sat out late with the children as the Storytellers unfolded bedtime stories under the onyx night. Out there the Milky Way was as clear as diamonds. Or, as they called it, the Backbone of Night. Half asleep, he listened to stories of hunters whom the Ancestors had gifted powers when they cried out for help, transformed as helpers for the wounded panther. The children painted protective spells on his face and shoulder, and he fell asleep, dreaming of war and wanting peace.</p><p>The night the Captain killed him, it happened suddenly.</p><p>“Now,” the Storyteller asked the children that night. “When the Ancestors come to you in dreams and ask, what is your greatest wish, what will your answer be? You there.” The child closest to the Storyteller muttered a wish to be transformed into an eagle to claw out the eyes of the evil ones. The other children muttered their appreciation of this prowess.</p><p>The child who was leading the trio painting him in spells that night thoughtfully dipped her finger into the white clay in the small calabash. “What is your greatest wish, Babahl?”</p><p>Even half asleep, he didn’t hesitate. “To feel no more fear.”</p><p>When he returned home that night, he stood for a long time in the darkness in his house. He turned on no lights. Instead he stood staring at the dome on his bed. Already his heart was enlarged, warmed. Comforted. Going over, he removed it. Walked back out to his living room and set it back it its normal place on the side table. Then he returned to his bedroom.</p><p>Getting in bed, he laid on his back. Closed his eyes, and began counting back from one hundred.</p><p>He stood staring up from the bottom of a dark stairwell, inside a blackened abandoned building. The target was up there, out of his reach. And he could not understand how he had become so severed from his own reach. Already he was beaten to a pulp, barely escaping the Captain, whose anger that night flamed and reached him too closely.</p><p>The soul in him burned like it was alive.</p><p>And he did not know why.</p><p>And through buildings, running through walls like paper, he could hear the Captain coming. The soul had weakened him . . .  </p><p>He had no time to turn before the Captain was on him.</p><p>Arms locked around his legs, the Captain caught him, tripping him to the ground. Together they fell, breaking walls and wooden staircase alike, splinters flying in all directions around them. Then he was being pinned, climbed, the hand around his throat harder than a steel vice, digging in hard enough to stop all air . . . It was hard to move . . . impossible to believe . . . With his arm he slammed down with all his might — hard, harder still— hard . . . This time there was no breaking free . . . he was losing consciousness . . . </p><p>There seemed to be . . . Water . . .  It was nice . . . wonderful . . . </p><p>Waving moss, green everywhere . . . and a merman . . . smiling, waving carefree at him . . . </p><p>With his left arm, he slammed down again, and again . . . </p><p>They were inside the earth . . . a trench dugout . . . it was raining. It was terrible, the world having ended . . . They had never understood how they still came to be together, even there . . . sharing a box of Hershey’s chocolate bars and a crate of K-rations . . . he knew these things . . . <i>How’d ya getta a hold of these,</i> he was being asked . . . <i>Told ’em I was with Captain America . . .</i> There was laughter . . . they were laughing themselves to tears . . . <i>We love each other . . . </i></p><p>He slammed down with his arm, over and over, over, and over . . . The hand around his throat pushed his head back, slowly, harder than anything he had ever felt. He was losing consciousness . . . </p><p>Then the flushed, bright blue-eyed face was right on top of his. “Let him go . . . <i>You son of a bitch . . . you let him go . . .</i>”</p><p>He saw the vulnerability in those eyes, and knowing his chance, brought his knee hard into the Captain’s side, expecting to send him crumpling with pain, but the hand that grabbed his knee was no less locked than the one around his throat. Something was different . . . something had changed . . .  And now worse . . . He was dying . . . </p><p>“Steve,” he gasped quietly, in his voice. “But . . . it’s me . . . it’s Bucky . . . why are you doing this . . .”</p><p>“He loves you,” gasped the Assassin when the grip only tightened. “Steve, he loves you . . . he’s here with me . . . he loves you . . .” </p><p>The Captain moved too fast to see — pulled so his head lifted off the concrete, reached behind him and grabbed his weapon, his SIG-Sauer, and pinned the nozzle to his chest. Right over his heart. An act of petty vengeance, to be sure. Bending over, eyes of blue fire, The Captain hissed into his face. “Bucky was never yours to have,” and pulled the trigger.</p><p>—</p><p>He woke up, oddly, very peacefully.</p><p>And went about his morning just as such. Rose from his bed, looked around his room in quietude, and went to open his front door. Made Brooklyn and Dodger their bowl and set it out. Smiling into the morning light while they fretted and pet him. He felt as he imagined he would if he ever smoked up with Luma. </p><p>That had just happened to him. He’d been in Wonderland, as Steve called it, for eight months now, seen all kinds of things, yet he didn’t believe what had just taken place in his own mind for nineteen days.</p><p>That he had somehow called Steve as a champion like in some ancient story to vanquish his fear. Like the true Avenger his guy was, to the very end.</p><p>And just like that, he remembered.</p><p>Too tripped to endure the hour-long commute, he made Shuri take a second off from work to drop him straight into the ravine. The Royal Family having permission to cross any airspace in the country, he was thanking her and dropping from her Wave Rider in under ten minutes, assuring her he’d take the train back. </p><p>He swam and hurried his way to Luma, and found her in the vast, sunlit Cavern, blissfully humming away in song with the rest of her Tribe.</p><p>He came to a stop in front of her.</p><p>“I said I’m with you till the end of the line.”</p><p>With no apparent need for explanation, she nodded.</p><p>“Like a train line.”</p><p>She was still nodding.</p><p>“Has he said these words back to you?”</p><p>He didn’t need even a second to recall the moment. “Yes.”</p><p>She said nothing more. And he stood there, breathing a little hard down at her, his spirit soaring like he had never felt in his life. Like he was doped out of his mind. She slowly began getting up from the floor, clutching the arm he quickly extended.</p><p>She then did something she had never done before — she walked him out to the entrance of the Caverns.</p><p>“Had you not destroyed the Assassin, even if Steve professed his love for you in return, you could not have loved him with ease, guiltlessly. The Assassin was the part of you that destroyed life — and love, I hope you can see, is a form of life.”</p><p>At the entrance, she turned to him, lifting her always warm hand to touch his face. “Well done, Bucky. Well done to both of you.”</p><p>“Does this mean— with my dream that started all of this . . . Are he and I —”</p><p>“Ready to get married?” she asked loudly, eyebrows raised dramatically. “No. You have work to do.”</p><p>“W-work?” </p><p>What the hell had he just been doing?</p><p>She patted his arm, beaming. “Trust me, this part, you’ll like. And you won’t even need your bed.”</p><p>He blinked at her. Not knowing what else to say, he stammered, “I’ll— I’ll see you in a couple of days?”</p><p>She was still smiling, and shook her head. “Your healing is over, Bucky.” </p><p>And she fell silent, as if thinking. Or waiting. And then her smile broadened, her sightless eyes opening and staring up at the ceiling of the hidden world.</p><p>“Come back . . . when he writes you a letter.”</p><p>•</p><p>
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    <b>CHAPTER 6 — COMING ASAP!</b>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. LETTERS FROM HOME</h2></a>
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            <p>Steve has pulled on some threads. But Steve has never been afraid to look anything in the face. Even his own past.</p>
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All his life, he had only ever seen Bucky with girls.</p><p>And it had never failed to impress. Bucky had zero friction with dames. <i>“Not wit’ dat hair, and dose eyes, and dem smarts,”</i> as this one kid on their block would always say. If they were worried, Bucky could make them feel good. If they were sad, Buck only had to smile. Not until he had himself been endowed with a Super serum that apparently made him physically irresistible to anyone within sight could he even claim to be in the same league. But before there had been serums, magic or enhancements, there had been Bucky Barnes.</p><p>He was six when Bucky rescued him from his first bully. A situation he had to admit he had fully provoked by refusing to get out of the kid’s way when everyone else had been scrambling to.</p><p>Bursting in uninvited at their lunch table, the kid, older, and without provocation, had begun clearing plates of hot lunches with his much larger forearm, sending hunks of beef, bread, splatters of creamed spinaches and the table’s steel non-homogenized milk canister flying, and kids wordlessly bolting for safety. Immediately, he’d stood up and grabbed the bully by the ears, of all things. A combat move he would not recommend. By instinct the kid had sent a fist upward into his exposed jaw, and it was only by the grace of God and the providence of Bucky Barnes that he hadn’t lost his new set of permanent front teeth right there on the first day of school. The sensation as a sickly six year old of getting his cheekbone slammed to a concrete floor was thankfully lost to the mists, but there followed a mad scramble to punch the hell out of his assailant, and then a feeling of unbelievable relief on his pressured body as the kid’s weight was suddenly off him. Panting dramatically and heroically to himself, he looked up to see a boy — tall, brown haired and blued-eye — in full grip of the bully’s hair. He had never seen anyone holler like what came next, even though his rescuer didn’t look at all mad. Only displaying the kind of controlled intimidation he wished even at that age he could execute. Head wrenched backward, the bully heard it there first, last, and in the face to <i>“Never . . . fucking . . . try it again!”</i> Then the bully was stumbling away, finding his feet and forgetting the bagged lunch whose comfort and positioning had seemed worth their very lives just moments before, pushing his way through the jeering circle of kids.</p><p>The brown haired boy stood over him, arm extended. “Take ma’ hand,” he said. “An’ stan’ up.”</p><p>He hadn’t.</p><p>Ever since he could remember, he’d suspected a difference about him that wasn’t kosher. And by a mess of a combination on his ma and pa’s sides, no part of him seemed willing to let it go unchallenged. First against his poor ma, daily throwing tantrums and crying bitter tears when she wouldn’t let him do what all the other kids were doing, keeping him from activities that would have triggered all kinds of hurt on his sickly body.</p><p>Too young to grasp what the problem might be, he’d only known that he hurt almost all the time. That the doctors seemed to know him by name when other kids didn’t even know what doctors were. They, the doctors, would tell his ma to make sure he got plenty of exercise as a growing child, and complying, he’d get an asthma attack. They’d tell her to take him on long walks in the park for fresh air, and complying, he’d be home and shivering all night under the blankets. Then they’d tell her to keep him wrapped up head to toe and not let the cold air into his lungs, and he’d be dragged off the streets by screaming kids, drenched in sweat and fainting from heat stroke. When he stayed home and did nothing at all, there would be days when he would be in such physical pain that his ma would sit by his bedside and simply cry. Sometimes it would be a neighborhood ma to watch him while she went to work. She’d been a nurse at King’s County and it had not always been easy to find someone to cover her shift on the days he had to be in bed.</p><p>He <i>looked</i> sick, even to his child eyes. He was so thin his chest went in where other kids’ didn’t. His arms were too skinny, even though his ma fed him all the time, his elbows and wrists showing more than he saw on anyone else. And from around age five, uncontrollable toddler tantrums having given way to a developing mind, allowing him to know the difference between him and the world outside of him, he would ask her all the time. Why he looked like this. And like any mother intent on protecting their child, she would smile lovingly at him. “Lotsa kids’re skinny, sweet pea,” she’d say in her soft Irish lilt. “No diff’r’nt than you.”</p><p>But between the vast psychologically different ages of five and six, there had been no more fooling him that something was seriously off about him. But his official entry into war was on starting kindergarten in Brooklyn in the no-bullshit, still open-borders immigration era of the early 192os. There his suspicions had been confirmed. Seeing as kids pulled neither verbal nor physical punches. It had been the worst, most volatile combination of circumstances, with the result that mere days into kindergarten she was having to apply her professional expertise as a nurse on her five year old kid. </p><p>Always, in kindergarten, he seemed cut, bruised, coughing or panting for breath. Any kid who taunted his appearance — never mind that half the time due to their multitude of ethnicities and accents they could hardly understand one another, but attitude being key — he’d ask to go on and punch him and see just how soft he was. Another not so great strategy from a position of actual weakness. And then, teacher’s note in hand, he would take himself home to his ma for clean up. </p><p>Already he could see the tears she’d blink back as she waited for him to climb the stool in the kitchen, already pushing down guilt and whatever else a six year old could feel, knowing he’d just given his ma another night of sitting by his bedside praying to the Lord he not fall sick.</p><p>What had she said just that morning. Being his first day of school, she’d squatted before him, and tenderly lifting his hand from where he held his elbow like an offending instrument, she’d given him the same practiced, heart-ached smile. “Today’s a big day and we’v’ ta get ya lookin’ just so handsome. Yu’ll have a wonderful time, woncha, Steven. Yu’ll make lotsa friends and yu’ll come back home with a big smile on yur face. Now hold still.” And he had, while she’d checked his knee length knickers, long stockings, leather book bag, and cocked his little hat just so. Then she had kissed him, and if she hadn’t put enough of her hope into words that he somehow turn a new leaf, she’d put it in her kiss.</p><p>But the result was always this. Not friends or a big smile, but a shiner and more tears for his ma.</p><p>Checking his face and painfully bruised up jaw, he brought his hand down and saw that there was no blood. He felt fine. His breathing was fine. Humiliation wasn’t even a factor cause at least he’d taken a stand. All told, he’d had worse rumbles in kindergarten.</p><p>So never mind this brown haired boy. He wasn’t impressed.</p><p>“Yer Sarah Rogers’ boy, ain’t cha?”</p><p>“<i>Who’s</i> askin’?”</p><p>“<i>C’mere.</i>”</p><p>Distant but rising, the cries of teachers assured him he didn’t have much room for argument. Teachers who must have arrived to an empty circle of dispersing kids, because the brown haired boy was already marching him away. Up to the school nurse he soon found out.</p><p>“Whatcha go do that for?” the brown haired boy asked. He spoke gently but impressionably . With the odd effect that even as he was scolding, it felt like being hugged.</p><p>“Whadda ya care?”</p><p>“Cuz we’re neighbors, y’ idiot.”</p><p>“<i>Whose</i> neighbor?” he’d asked in suspicious surprise.</p><p>But they’d reached the nurse’s office, who’d taken one startled look at his deathly skinny frame and cried, “Yuh must beh Stev’ Rujus! Who on earth wud put theh hands on yuh!”</p><p>Fully expecting Bucky to rat him out as the aggressor and for his kindergarten reputation to instantly follow him into grade school, he’d looked over instead in confusion as Bucky had raised a hand and slowly but confidently shaken his head. </p><p>“Nuttin’ but’a misunderstandin’, Nurse Bowers. All parties reconciled, no harm done.”</p><p>Nurse Bowers had seemed about as interested in pursuing further inquiry as any underpaid public school worker not wishing to lose her sanity in the New York School system. And definitely not before 1 p.m. on the first day of term.</p><p>“Well, all right. Get him in here, in here. The school’s already set aside yur file, yuh kno’. And we’ve been told to keep an eye out for yuh. Yuh have to be very careful with— What do yuh think yur doin’, yung man, yuh  can’t stay.”</p><p>“But I have to,” Bucky said, so quietly.</p><p>“And why is that?” Bucky was silent. “Has his mutha asked yuh to look after him?”</p><p>“No, ma’am, I never met his ma.”</p><p>“Then why on eurth do yuh believe yuh need to stay?” she’d asked almost in amusement.</p><p>Silence.</p><p>“Well?”</p><p>“Because— I’m responsible for him.”</p><p>“On whose authority?” he’d cried indignantly, sending the tall boy a glare.</p><p>“<i>Hush,</i> child. You, leave, now. Back to lunch, hour’s almost over.”</p><p>But after school Bucky had been waiting outside the building. So it was that on the conclusion of his first day of elementary school, he had intact memories of this boy he didn’t know taking him by the hand and walking him home from school. Unusual nowadays perhaps, but nearly unimpeachable back then. Retreating as he had been in the face of the triple invocations of his ma’s name, their block, and the presence that somehow really did seem responsible for him. The grip on his hand alone stopped all protest. Had a photograph been captured that afternoon, it would have been of him with the fiercest, most self-disappointed frown a six year old could muster.</p><p>His ma worked early and got home a little before dinner time, which meant he usually got home a couple hours before she did. Normally he’d let himself in and sit in the living room, occupying himself trying to decipher the funnies, what have you. Back then kids were expected to be independent a lot earlier. If he felt sick there were several neighbors he could inform.  Wrenching his hand from Bucky’s as soon as he’d unlocked the back door, he’d beelined for his bedroom and flopped face down, not caring what the brown haired boy would do with himself. Bucky had found a book in their living room and waited.</p><p>So shortly after, there he and his ma were all over again, except this time with a new addition. Him on the tall kitchen stool, his ma before him, and Bucky patiently helping her. Nurse Bowers had applied ointments and the rest, but she was checking for signs of damage that might later mean danger. She did know Bucky, as it turned out, strangely enough to him for whom the ways of neighborhood ma’s was still the stuff of childhood mysteries.</p><p>Working silently in the late afternoon, her eyes were moist and she’d sniffed as controllably as possible, only occasionally softly asking for antiseptic or anything else, at which Bucky would hurriedly turn and stare into her kit until a spelling seemed familiar enough to reach in and grab her a bottle.</p><p>She’d served as a nurse with an ambulance company in the Great War that had taken his pa, a job which in modern warfare was called a combat nurse, so she never reacted while performing initial ministrations, only ever telling him to take a seat on the stool in the kitchen and getting to it. But in the morning when she hugged and kissed him off to kindergarten, her tears would fall a little as she checked over his cuts and scrapes as though peeling back the most painful of bandages. But even then she would never outright cry.</p><p>Old Mrs Ingus next door would declare to anyone with time to hear that she hadn’t cried since his pa hadn’t returned from the War. But that wasn’t true. She cried at nights alone in her bedroom. He’d hear it walking to the john late at night and hate himself for being her child. Why hadn’t God given her an only child who could help her like all the other kids whose pa’s were also gone. Not some fragile, sickly thing who wasn’t even allowed to do house chores because he could get an asthma attack. Barely out of toddlerhood, he’d nonetheless imbibed the few pictures of his pa around the house, strong and heroic in his uniform. Only ever able to see his Sarah in regimental aid stations by faking something and getting a quick ride to the rear. So they could steal hugs and kisses like strangers outside of their home of Brooklyn. He even remembered his father’s voice, though she would tell him he didn’t, couldn’t, seeing as he was still in her womb when his father had died in the War.</p><p>“So ya can’t know what he sounded like, sweet pea,” she would tell him, smiling and kissing him. “Ya can’t.”</p><p>But he had. Mrs Ingus would later tell him his pa had been no-frills, got the job done: “Whatever Sarah needed, Joe got done.” He’d understood it even before he knew what it meant.</p><p>But now Joe was gone, and it was him, and although she told him all the time how like his pa he was, even as a child he rejected her sentiments whole, knowing he was as useless as his father had been useful.</p><p>Pretending now that the brown haired boy wasn't there to see his disgrace, he tried to catch her eyes.</p><p>“I’m sorry, ma,” he whispered.</p><p>“It’s okay, sweet pea.”</p><p>Of that late afternoon in his ma’s kitchen, he had no need for a photograph, as he could see the snapshot as clear as looking at it. Not just for capturing his first day meeting Bucky, but of his coming life until fate snatched away his ma and the Army did the same with Bucky — the front-line nurse at a loss mending her perennially stubborn child who sat staring forlornly at her, while, unknown at the time, their mutual salvation sat between them quietly handing her supplies.</p><p>“Thank ye, Bucky,” she sniffed, packing up. “Ye should go home. Yer ma’ll be lookin’.”</p><p>“Yes, Mrs Rogers. G’night, Steve. See y’at school.”</p><p>He’d ignored Bucky. Normally his ma would have reprimanded him, but she was just managing to keep it together as it was.</p><p>It wasn’t for many years, until they were teenagers, that he’d found out that on that afternoon it had been mere months since Buck had lost his younger sister Rebecca. By which time it had been much too late to apologize to Bucky. Who by then was no longer seven and had bigger Steve Rogers problems to deal with.</p><p>But from that morning of first grade until that very evening in the future in which he was thinking of him, Bucky Barnes had never let him go.</p><p>And God knew, he had released that hold more times than he could count. Or tried to anyway, being always in some anguish or other, certainly more than anyone could ever possibly understand or appreciate. Those times had not been pretty. But Buck never once slackened his hold.</p><p>Every morning from that afternoon in the kitchen, Bucky would come by their house and walk him to school. They lived across from each other, backyards almost facing but for one brownstone. All the women in the neighborhood did know each other, being all immigrants or first generation and having all gone to war a decade earlier in some way or other. Bucky too, of course did know him, but for him their worlds had only intersected when he entered school.</p><p>So now he had a big kid walking him each morning to school. But the entire time, he never once spoke to Bucky. Yup, for two solid weeks, Bucky showed up, greeted his ma and waited while he collected his books, then walked him to their elementary school, and he never uttered a peep the whole way. Street teeming with kids, Bucky saying hi to everyone, people saying hi back, him, silent. And on the weekends, here would come the brown haired boy, “Hey, Rogers,” hopefully. “Come play with us, we’re starting stickball.” And he would ignore him, making his way wherever he was going, to the general store for his ma or wherever. This was him at six, attitude enough for the whole world. </p><p>On the third week of first grade, Monday morning, he overheard Bucky in the kitchen talking to his ma. “Mrs Rogers, how come Steve won’t play with us?”</p><p>“Oh, sweetheart,” she said softly. “He really can’t. He’s sickly and it would start his asthma and all kinds of other things. So better he not do too much.” But what did kids do if not play outside, he’d anguish to himself in his bedroom. The whole world awaiting and him stuck inside. He certainly hadn’t been about to sit and read a book.</p><p>“Is that why you put all those things in his bag, in case he gets sick?”</p><p>“That’s right, luv.”</p><p>“Oh,” said Bucky. “Well, then, I’ll stop playing until he can.”</p><p>After a very long moment, he had walked out of his bedroom to stand and stare at the brown haired boy. Who on seeing him turned and stared his grown-up blue eyes at him. “Hey, Rogers. Ya ready?”</p><p>He nodded at him, followed him out. Down their back steps, across the backyards, through the empty lots between the brownstones, and out onto the street. And after they crossed the front of the general store and when they reached the intersection, he turned and looked at him. Even at six, having to look up. “Why is your name Bucky?”</p><p>Bucky didn’t seem surprised at the reemergence of his voice. Only looked down at him. And for the first time since they had met, Bucky smiled.</p><p>After that he went no day without seeing Bucky, who to his six year old mind was as adult as a big kid got. Which, unfortunately, did also mean that Bucky would instruct him and it became his job to resist, which in turn only strengthened Bucky’s protection of him. </p><p>His ma, however, had found an ally. </p><p>True to his word, Bucky had not gone out to play on the street for weeks after making the promise to her. Something he knew because he had carefully monitored. Being fall and the weather starting to cool in the late afternoons after school, she would make him stay indoors, and looking out the living room windows he had kept an eye out for the tall brown haired boy. The neighborhood block was the entire world a kid knew and no one went farther to play. But Bucky never went out there. Most evenings, instead, Mrs Barnes would let Bucky come over and stay through dinner and they would read comic strips or build erector sets. Bucky also read actual books; him, not so much. And even for Christmas, when it was just too cold and he was barely allowed out of the warmth of the living room, a period which for him had always been a faraway thing like looking into a snow globe, there Bucky was with him. And both their ma’s, and a few women and kids from the block, making egg creams in the kitchen — seltzer, chocolate or vanilla syrup, and milk, non-homogenized in their day. And boy, had he loved him some egg cream. So there’d be Buck, making sure he had his fill. Cause it was Christmas and all. Festivities he would normally see only from the living room windows now suddenly having his ma’s kitchen as the hotbed.</p><p>Soon it became a regular sight to see his ma sitting in the living room mending his clothes and radiating gratitude for her son having somehow stumbled upon a best friend who was also a stabilizing influence. And by and large he <i>was</i> behaving better. He was even starting to feel like a regular kid, with a big brother who was also his best friend and everything.</p><p>But there had been days when even Bucky couldn’t make it better. When he would wake up in pain all over and his ma would lie with him on the couch, until she was crying too much and would have to bundle him up and send for the doc. And Bucky would sit crosslegged on the floor and mostly just look scared. Anguished and confused, pelting Doc Hollister with all kinds of questions.</p><p>Nonetheless, with Bucky’s friendship he went two  full years without a single asthma attack.</p><p>Then in the early spring when he was eight and looking healthier than she had seen in ages, both his ma and Doc Hollister had told him, she permitted him and Bucky to go to the arcade. Brooklyn in the Roaring Twenties was that combination of big city and small neighborhood that was just ideal. Manhattan across the water was always  trying too hard, but Brooklyn, with an even larger population, was city plus small town plus <i>people.</i> It had everything anyone could hope for. The schools were good and plentiful, if you were into that sort of thing, all the way from elementary to technical to the arts to colleges. The treelined neighborhoods were glorious, there were institutes of arts and sciences for cultured and smart people, there were movie theaters, lives theaters, classical music concerts, including an all-female orchestra that played a couple times a year, comedy shows, street fairs, block parties, parades, open air markets, downtown shopping, and of course, before Disneyland ever existed, there was Coney Island. </p><p>Now Coney Island was still a few years away, for when he was feeling even stronger, cause his ma wasn’t about having that until then. So for a few more years, the fabled resort was still just a glimmer in his eye. But for him, making it even to the closer penny arcades was hot stuff enough.</p><p>So that was where she entrusted Bucky to take him once it seemed he’d stabilized a little, with no expectations of trouble. </p><p>On their way back that particular afternoon, he spotted a pup. Under the grease stained elevated train tracks, tiny as a passed over thought. At first, walking by, he’d thought it was a small lump of black rag moving on its own somehow. Until he saw that it was a newborn laboring for breath. </p><p>Stopping abruptly enough that Bucky had to stop himself paces ahead and look back, he’d gone over and dropped to his knees before he was sure what he was doing. Gently into his scooped his hands he’d lifted the pup, so starved and frail that even to him the feel of his hands seemed unforgivably harsh. And he had waited for Bucky to tell him to leave it, that it was dirty and he could get infected. But no words came from Bucky. “I gotta take him home,” he’d said in a shaking voice as Bucky had lowered himself to his side. Placing his steady nine year old hand underneath his trembling eight year old one, Bucky had said, “It’s a she.”</p><p>He’d nodded. “She’s not sick,” he immediately insisted. “Just skinny’s all.” And Bucky had taken off his baseball hat and he’d carefully placed the newborn inside its bowl, and slowly, already in pieces from the death he knew he would be overseeing in weeks, if not days, Bucky had walked by his side home.</p><p>His ma had said nothing. Just respected his decree that she apply her nursing skills in support by providing an old cardboard box for a home. Then gently showed him how he would feed and keep warm his rescue. </p><p>“Here,” Bucky had said the following morning before school, lowering into a crouch and lining the cardboard box with a square of cotton cushion. “Ma says this’ll help.” </p><p>“How?”</p><p>“We gotta keep ’er warm.”</p><p>They’d set her in a corner of the kitchen near the stove and for the next several days he and Bucky had watched over her. Starved, mangy, sick and already dying, all he’d done was buy himself heartache at a tender age. He’d rub life into her until, tired, Bucky would put his arm around him and take over, until the pup died.</p><p>They buried her in the backyard. Bucky kneeling with him, taking his hand and staying silent while he’d proved unable to cry tears too intense for a child his age, or to be explained solely by the death of a sick pet.</p><p>That was the night, two years into their young lives of knowing each other, that Bucky first experienced one of his asthma attacks.</p><p>That he couldn’t cry didn’t mean that Bucky at age nine could not. Bucky had stood at the foot of his bed, eyes wide and stunned completely free of reaction while his mother had hustled about his bed. Get me this, get me that, Bucky, was what he remembered between his horrific gasping, sucking in shallow air through a gaping mouth as though trying to fill his lungs from only a paper straw. And Bucky frozen at the foot of his bed. Bucky had not done a single thing his ma had asked. </p><p>Until, at last, subsided, nebulizer over his nose and mouth, his ma by his beside pumping aerosol into his lungs, wiping the sweat from his forehead and her cool lips replacing her hand, Bucky had suddenly broken into a loud, devastated keening. And he watched hazily as she was then also having to pull close a hysterically crying Bucky.</p><p>Bucky’s ma had to come get him, both women wearily cajoling as they tried to make Bucky go. Until Mrs Barnes gave up. “Ehss not contagious,” she sighed, in her thick Polish accent “Ant ehss weekent. Do you miant?”</p><p>“Not a’tall,” his ma said, and so Mrs Barnes had brought night clothes and gotten Bucky ready for bed. Him, struggling with sleep, barely processing the drama going on. Climbing in with him, Bucky had laced their fingers under the cover, and he only remembered turning to Bucky and seeing the drying tears on Bucky’s face. “Don’t cry, Bucky,” he’d said hoarsely, sounding ghoulish through the nebulizer, “I’m okay.” Bucky had nodded, sniffing bravely. “Gonna be raigh’ heya, Steve,” and him thickly whispering, “Okay.” Like the two of them were saving each other from monsters of the deep, never mind the ma’s.</p><p>All told, Bucky made his early childhood wonderful. Steeped as he got in the coming years in the poison of his own misery, Bucky and the love of his ma were really all he remembered wholesomely from childhood. </p><p>Although Bucky might have a different take on the matter. As, if he remembered correctly, and he did, he wasn’t sure just how prepared Bucky had been for his little hellraiser self. There they’d be at the arcade and he’d spot some kid in line snatching another kid’s money, shoving them, and it would be on. Here’d come Steve Rogers, reprimanding and getting someone’s fist in his face. What he remembered most from outdoor early childhood actually was Bucky’s constant startled exclamations. “Christ, Steve! Get back here!” “Holy shit!” “Jeeezus <i>Christ!</i>” and Bucky hurrying over to tear some, always, bigger kid off him. </p><p>“You gonna fight 'im?” This would be Bucky to the kid. “Look’a him, that make sense to ya?”</p><p>“I cu’ take ‘im!”</p><p>“Zip it, Steve!”</p><p>“I’ll bust ya face the next time!”</p><p>“I’m waitin’ on ya!”</p><p>This would be him over a nickel.</p><p>And whenever he triggered illness from his heroic exertions, if it wasn’t evil enough to have her in pieces, and if it was warm enough, his ma would set them up on the screened porch out back; him wheezing softly on the sofa and Bucky settling into some busted old armchair. Always, reaching for a stack of books.</p><p>“Huck Finn?”</p><p>“What an idiot.”</p><p>“The Jungle Book?”</p><p>“Kid had wolves an’ a pantha,” he’d rasp, “an’ left to go live wit’ people. Character. Skippit.”</p><p>“Tom Brown’s School Days?” </p><p>“Yer killin’ me here.” To Bucky chuckling. So they’d go down the stack. </p><p>“How ‘bout Kidnapped?”</p><p>“Yeh,” he’d sigh. And Bucky would read him the adventures of the persecuted, underestimated hero of the Scottish Highlands.</p><p>One evening, back from a late shift, he overheard his ma thanking Bucky for being such a good friend to him. “When he’s with ye he doesn’t care so much about being sick.”</p><p>And she had been right about that.</p><p>The day he would identify as their transition from childhood he supposed, was one about a year into the Great Depression.</p><p>The Wall Street Crash of ’29 had come for Brooklyn as it had for the rest of an otherwise prospering and thrilled country — as a literal shock to the system. And the next three years, Brooklyn was in the grips of the sustained aftermath. Until Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn into office in March of 1933, instituting the New Deal and bringing back jobs and wages, the country suffered in a way that it hadn’t before or since. Families fortunate enough to see enough food on the table coped. Those that weren’t were destroyed. It got down to that — sometimes nothing else but whether there was food to eat.</p><p>Brooklyn like the rest of the country found whatever ways to survive. But not only did they survive, the neighborhoods came together. Some historians would later propose that the solidarity their communities found during that time was what made their generation strong to go to war. Possibly. Theirs had certainly become a world made up of church potlucks and community gardens. All those empty lots of his early childhood transformed into richly colored vegetable gardens. Not to mention backyards and open fields and practically anywhere with soil. </p><p>But that was the adult world. As kids what mostly stood out about the period was that a lot of places closed, food in quantity became something they were all very aware of, and, a fact he could attest to personally, the stunning surprise of seeing what seeds turned into given soil, water and time. And also that some people’s pa’s left and never came back home.</p><p>And even that was orders of magnitude from daily life as a kid. He for instance would have just been happy if other kids’ attitudes towards him had bent as charitably as the rest of society. Far from it.</p><p>Adolescence, predictably, had not been kind to him.</p><p>Around age nine, he had started to look pronouncedly different — always small, but now everyone seemed to be growing except him. As though his body was struggling where for everyone else things were just happening naturally. On the block, if not in the entire neighborhood, it seemed to him that he was the only kid who didn’t look the same, feel the same. And kids had a field day with that.</p><p>Because of Bucky, he endured the snide jeering, the horrible name calling. If he was hearing it, so was Bucky. But all Bucky would do was get between him and them, same as always. Ten years old, eleven years old; Bucky would just remind him of whatever new comic strip they were waiting on, whatever it took to distract him. And for Bucky’s sake he would leave it.</p><p>But rather than cooling, the tension between him and kids who loved to bully seemed only to increase.</p><p>Then one evening at a potluck at Bucky’s parents’ church, he and Bucky had scored a pair of pews in the kids section which they turned to face each other. Legs outstretched across to Bucky’s, he’d been slouched comfortably in his own, both of them talking above the din of kids eating and carrying on beyond the reprimands of ma’s and pa’s. There’d been a giant barrel of bottled egg creams and milkshakes and an assortment of Hershey’s, paper-wrapped sandwiches and all kinds of things the Depression Era only allowed during such times. And kids were stacking up to take home. Sun shining outside, plenty of food to fill their stomachs, he’d been listening to Bucky talking about the fact that a new planet had been discovered in the solar system. Like, who cared? Which then morphed into Buck’s favorite topic, the future — how the world would change after this, get better, all the things he was gonna show him. Being older, everything Bucky told him seemed believable, and despite himself he would raptly listen.</p><p>But even by then, in his heart he had already started worrying about the future. Concerned far beyond his years.</p><p>Then a kid began walking by. Once, a couple of times, smirking down at him. He always saw it, Bucky never did. On a third circuit, knee bent as proof of having gauged well, the kid very deliberately, and with an intensity he would never forget, slammed his knee into his. Pain flashed the entire right side of his body and momentarily blinded him with shock and Bucky had risen and slapped the lights out of the kid before the boy knew what had hit back.</p><p>Hand jammed to his face, the kid stared in shock at Bucky, while he sat with shaking hands locked to the knee he had in a silent scream clutched. Shivering inside a body wanting nothing more than to collapse on itself, while Bucky stood still as a statue. The kid’s face was contorted in repressed rage and fear, but Bucky only waited for the chance. He was twelve and Bucky thirteen, and the kid had to be fifteen.</p><p>“Hey, hey!” came the cry of their neighborhood diner owner Mr Novak. “Not here, James! Stop dat! I know your <i>fader!</i>”</p><p>Still Bucky waited. Until burning red, the boy had let his friends drag him off and hastily Bucky bent toward him. But just as quickly he lowered his screaming leg from the pew and turned away, swallowing his pain and choking that he was fine. Behind them he could already hear the snickering about how he was going to go home and snap like a toothpick for his ma to pick up the pieces. Discreetly looking over his shoulder, he noted who had spoken, fully intending to put them on his long list. One day he would pay them all back, with interest. Bucky sat down and reached for their stash of food, before standing back up to go find them a “couple extra chocolate egg creams to go. Wait here.”</p><p>He never picked up on what Bucky must have sensed for a while. That in more than economic ways, childhood had ended and the hard teenage years had begun.</p><p>Because until that moment, Bucky had never hit a kid.</p><p>The next few years of his life could have easily seen him fall into a despondency. Adolescence had a way of making the world seem as immutable as enamel, and for him it was no different. They were growing older and Bucky was shooting upward in height with him staying where he reached at thirteen. Daily and very painfully he was realizing that life was going to be very different for him and his best friend. He knew it in a way he couldn’t articulate much less hope to make Bucky understand, so he didn’t even try. He’d see Bucky looking at him, trying to, but what could kids their age ably convey or truly grasp.</p><p>But he felt that despondency growing inside him like air filling up a balloon.</p><p>For him, everything he feared his ma would have to endure over him seemed to be coming to pass. The older he got the more he comprehended just how much he wasn’t anything like his pa. Who from photographs alone looked like he could save entire neighborhoods from distress. Tall and handsome for the soft caring light in his eyes, his son seemed to have been born under a different star. He didn’t feel soft, or particularly caring about so many things people thought were important. There were no lights in the eyes looking back at him in the mirror. No heroism in the face he saw. And although his near constant childhood ailments had decreased in frequency, he was just as skinny, just as apt to crash his health from a stiff breeze off the ocean front as from a street fight. By thirteen he’d confirmed to himself what the five year old knew — that he was nothing but a burden to the new mother his heroic pa had left behind.</p><p>So the more he pretended not to know his ma spent nights with his pa’s picture clutched to her, weeping herself to sleep. But loving her son and aware of his insecurities, she never mentioned her lost husband. That was what his attitude so foolishly did to their home, that she couldn’t talk to him about his own pa. That his father’s love was a threat to his sense of self. </p><p>Nonetheless, however ironic, whatever formed his internal makeup would think of his pa and not let him stop. He could not stop speaking up in the presence of bullies. No more than he could have stopped breathing.</p><p>“Try, Steve,” Bucky Barnes would tell him at any given opportunity.</p><p>Usually, at some street party. Distant from their neighborhood, both of them at fourteen and fifteen drunk on Jewish liquor. It had been early Prohibition, and he’d get to that. But there’d been an influx of Jews fleeing a heating up Germany, which as teenagers all they knew about it was that the new immigrants had brought all kinds of new booze just in time.</p><p>Propped on wrought iron chairs, drunk, and looking up at the night sky. Teenagers, so the world was theirs. Around them would be which ever ethnic group’s celebration they’d crashed. The Irish, the Italians — Buck’s pa was English-Italian, so there they’d be, butchering the language — the Poles, whomever, celebrating who knew what and what saints; the newly emigrated Jews celebrating their religious days, the Blacks street dancing to hot jazz, the Puerto Rican dames flashing slips with the bomba. Ask again why they were in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, or wherever across the water, and even that afternoon in the future he had no cogent answer, except that it had been the days of raw artistry and Bucky Barnes had aways lived in a world or magic.</p><p>“Ya tone it down,” Buck would say. “We ain’t kids no more. Sarah ain’t got no pro’lems but you.”</p><p>“Yeh, yeh.”</p><p>“You <i>listen.</i>”</p><p>“Who sez I ain’t.”</p><p>Buck would look away. They’d be watching fireworks. Or some saint’s giant effigy being lit up. Or if it was Harlem, as those jazz numbers went from sizzling to smoldering, the inevitable marathon makeout sessions that would follow. Stuff to singe eyebrows. </p><p>So there they’d be, him trying to get an eyeful, Buck’s arm draped along the back of his chair and Bucky scolding him. They hardly ever knew anyone in the neighborhoods they crashed so Buck would always have him close, under-arm. For the protection of others as much as himself, he imagined.</p><p>“Yer ma loves ya, Steve.”</p><p>“Oh yeh, Buck. How ‘bout you tell me sommin’ I don’t know.”</p><p>“Well how ‘bout this. Half’a what you put Sarah through, you cu’ spare her, yer majesty.”</p><p>Which, normally, quieted him for a few days.</p><p>But it didn’t matter how far they travelled, he’d always find someone to cross. Still come home to his poor ma bruised up. See her hands trembling uncontrollably as he began hacking up a lung or something and watch Bucky take the swabs and bottles from her, promising he’d take care of it, before pushing him into his bedroom.</p><p>It had been a tough age to see only a future filled with personal misery. Unsure how to face the clash that was his world, he began finding comfort in retreating into his own head. It seemed the only way to block the pain.</p><p>And he would have done all right by his plans there, let the world pass him by while slashing and gashing at it whenever it came too close. Except that Bucky Barnes was in his life. </p><p>Bucky would not let him get lost inside himself. Not at thirteen, not at fifteen, not at eighteen. Not if he had and was nothing. No matter that he tried. </p><p>Hardly a day went by that he could satisfyingly stew in his misery. Waking with every intention to do so, the day would instead somehow end somewhere he would not have expected, his body flooded with dopamine and more happiness than he’d know what to do with. </p><p>So instead of a self-fulfilling promise of a life filled with bile and constant plots of vengeance, his teenage years proved even more wonderful than his childhood.</p><p>Their early teens was Depression Era, but it was also Prohibition. Yeah. The era of gangsters, bank robbers and bootleggers — organized crime coming into its own. Liquor had been banned, still as mind-boggling to imagine, therefore liquor became the new gold rush. So like most kids their age, they’d hustled to live like the mythologized gangsters and bootleggers. They didn’t get into crime <i>per se,</i> but they sure as hell made a lot of money selling liquor, Bucky’s clientele of Catholic Church Fathers being their main base. Both Buck’s parents and Sarah Rogers being Catholic, they’d had unfettered access and were soon practically sainted. </p><p>On this semi-criminal endeavor, Buck had been the brawn and not the brains. What a shocker. He’d explain to Bucky how they could triple their cashflow with a simple trick of watered down seltzer and egg cream syrup. Their suppliers wouldn’t have been happy, their buyers certainly weren’t, but boy had they raked it in.</p><p>Literally often raking cash off the table and into crates in backrooms.</p><p>“This dusun’t taste quite right,” they’d hear, departing. “I’ll have yur hide, lad. Are you shure naw?”</p><p>“Yeh, fuck off.”</p><p>This would be Buck to a Catholic priest. </p><p>“Yung man!”</p><p>“I said, fuck off.”</p><p>And they would.</p><p>In that crazy time, a new decade of prosperity was slowly but surely unfolding from the efforts of the New Deal. </p><p>And with it came the dawn of a new era.</p><p>The future Bucky so believed in was taking shape. And Buck had been born ready to absorb its promises.</p><p>Each day it seemed a throng was on their way somewhere to get wowed by some brand new experience. Museums, exhibitions . . . <i>openings:</i> the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, Radio City Music Hall, George Washington Bridge, Rockefeller Plaza, La Guardia; sitting through Movietone newsreels shining on the silver screen with events from across the country and around the world, including a lot of stuff about some young millionaire named Stark; joining crowds in cafes riveted by boxing matches blared on radios; the latest larger than life Hollywood movie being shown in equally crazy themed, glittering movie theaters; who was attempting a cross-Atlantic flight that day, what was going on with Charles Lindbergh, the Joe Louis fight at Yankee Stadium for which Buck somehow scored tickets along with seventy thousand other New Yorkers; and forget about New York World’s Fair in ’39. Buck had lived off that high straight through until the U.S. joined the War. </p><p>“C’ma c’ma, come <i>oohwonn,</i>” would be the call on any given weekend morning. Heard live from the living room, or if God having pity on him, from the back porch, or better yet muffled through his bedroom window. </p><p>“Wuttt . . .!” drowsily, trying to keep up. “Where th’ fuck’re we goin’ this time . . .”</p><p>“<i>Language,</i> young man!” That’d be his ma, from somewhere inside the house. Followed by deathly silence from him and Buck. But he’d definitely be up then.</p><p>So there he’d be putting himself together while stumping out the back door, always much too early for anything on a weekend, joining Bucky to wherever. </p><p>That particular morning of his ma being there to tell him off, it had been the opening of the Empire State Building.</p><p>The steel and concrete, the truly unbelievable height. The tallest building in the world.</p><p>“This is the future,” Buck had said, head upturned and mind as far away, as though he really could see the future.</p><p>He’d been looking around them.</p><p>As interested and impressed as on the first day of grade school. </p><p>It was always the same, just different eras in which to ooh and aah. Everyone acting as if there were no real problems in the world.</p><p>“It’s the future, Steve,” Buck had breathed.</p><p>“Yeh, yeh, heard’ja the first time.”</p><p>And then Buck had put his arm around him.</p><p>He remembered it no less now than then. How it had struck him. Bucky’s arm suddenly around his waist and the moment feeling nothing out of the ordinary. So he still wasn’t really sure why he’d noticed. </p><p>Even looking from the future, he was trying to see how it might have looked objectively. But male to male public displays of affection was viewed differently back then. Not to mention that for him especially, it was completely normal. Bucky had always held him against all kinds of things, and the crowd that morning was nothing short of gargantuan. Self aware as he been about his size, Bucky had only seemed to be caring for his physical safety. The arm around him seemed to reinforce that.</p><p>And then Bucky had turned and smiled at him.</p><p>He remembered that too. Those grown-up eyes he seemed to have been looking into for so many years. The confident, unassuming smile that seemed only ever to ask for a bit of his time, in exchange for which he would experience total happiness. Followed always by the nearly imperceptible nod that seemed to ask simply for confirmation of a mutual love and understanding.</p><p>All things too subtle for his teenage mind to understand. All he knew that morning was that Bucky’s smile and confidence had shut everything off. His protests had gone crumbling.  “All right, you,” he told him.</p><p>“Wha’?” Bucky asked, feigning innocence while tightening his arm around him. “You were gonna say somthin’ ‘bout how this wasn’t the most amazin’ thin’ you eva saw.”</p><p>He’d smiled wryly, no answer. Hardly anything felt as good as when Bucky got this happy.</p><p>So he started toning it down with Bucky a little. Not as much as he should have, but it occurred to him that he really ought to stop being such a hothead toward Bucky when it was just the two of them. Not only did Buck not deserve his attitude, he derived no pleasure from seeing Bucky’s own happiness diminished. </p><p>And never mind his attitude, he would have bashed himself in the head than go anywhere without Bucky. Especially when that bounce from dark to light happened from simply knowing he was about to open his eyes in the morning and see Bucky.</p><p>In their teenage years, that had been enough.</p><p>So Bucky had dragged him to all kinds of events all over Brooklyn and Manhattan, and there he’d be making an effort to listen to being read aloud whatever some pamphlet said — how in the future there would be steamboats in the sky, humans could be programmed like computers to do assigned tasks without “concerns of conscience,” which . . . okay, and electric trains that would run on magnetism, whatever that actually was. Buck was tops in school in not just math and English but geography and civics and things like that, so could always put their world in context. Whereas Steve Rogers could barely remembered where his pencils were after first grade.</p><p>It bore mentioning at this point that the one thing he really wanted Bucky to teach him, boxing, Bucky ignored him whenever he asked. The gym where Bucky trained wouldn’t let him inside its doors even to spectate. And believe, Steve Rogers had pestered Bucky Barnes on that matter. But Buck would literally not see him when he started talking on it.</p><p>But there they were, Bucky guzzling life and pulling him along, and him loving every second of it.</p><p>“Is that a smile I see?”</p><p>That’d be his ma. And him and Bucky on kitchen stools, demolishing her fettuccine Alfredo, back then the hot dish to try, according to the ladies magazines, and Buck telling her wherever they were headed for that day.</p><p>“Have fun, sweet pea,” she’d call as they left.</p><p>“Tol’ja, ma,” he’d say, while Buck kissed her before trotting down the back steps after him. “Sweet pea doesn’t live here anymore.”</p><p>And she’d laugh and say, “Heard’ja the first time— sweet pea,” and Bucky would laugh his head off. </p><p>True highlights.</p><p>Then into this life came girls. </p><p>Honestly, looking back? It wasn’t that bad. It was horrible, no question. Dating back then had been like being walked out in front of a firing squad each time. </p><p>Yet he hadn’t killed himself over it. Because somehow he seemed to have realized early on that dames weren’t really his problem in life. That he might actually fare better later on and so no need to worry too much. A mystery where he got that positive an attitude, although he supposed between the ma he loved so much and Bucky, it would have been hard not to.</p><p>But it was an attitude that had paid off in embarrassing quantities when, on his Captain America USO tour, lots of dames had complimented him on his tremendously cheerful attitude. Forever a laugh riot.</p><p>Besides, it wasn’t as though he’d been some prize date himself. He hardly ever applied his brain to anything besides trying to land a punch or sell a bottle of liquor, and half the stuff he knew came from Bucky or his ma. Had any girl actually given him the time of day, he would have had the worst time trying to make conversation beyond baseball or boxing. Somehow it didn’t translate that he could make Buck laugh himself stupid, for days. But with dames he mustered all the charm of an empty hand puppet.</p><p>He remembered that, Bucky grabbing at him all day demanding he repeat for anyone within earshot whatever inane thing he’d said before. He remembered that; Buck’s hand always on his forearm or on his hip, “Steve say it again, tell ‘em what you tol’ me,” and him kinda self-conscious knowing it hadn’t been <i>that</i> funny. No dame had ever found it funny, you could believe that. And he remembered once, turning an unsure look at Bucky regarding repeating some throwaway line on the wisdom of unloading barrels of flour behind a laundromat — a job they’d completed days before — only to be faced with Bucky’s blissed out smile. What he remembered next was feeling flushed. It had seemed indecent to interfere with Bucky’s happiness. So he’d go ahead and tell his silly joke, get the blank stares while Bucky was dying.</p><p>So, if only Buck had been a dame, right?</p><p>Buck on the other hand had it covered with girls. From news of the day, to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s proper diction, which had every girl bewitched, to whether and just how the dame in question looked good that evening. It all came easy to Bucky. If a dame was fretting or concerned over something, didn’t matter if it was family, teachers, new walking shoes, Bucky would just smile, put an arm around her, and without even words make her feel that it might just be the times they lived in, and either way, she wasn’t alone. <i>He’d</i> have been looking for where the hell the teacher lived or who’d sold her bad walking shoes.</p><p>But the major reason those dating years had not been so bad was because in those years were, unrivaled, the fondest memories of his life.</p><p>Besides <i>satisfying . . .</i> should he say, some of his needs vicariously through Bucky, on those dates he had seen everything New York in the ‘30s had to offer. And listen, he’d seen the future New York and could testify that it did not hold a candle. Leaving aside the neighborhood block parties that would turn into hedonistic scenes, also violent ones, he could attest, and discovering that with the barest of head turns the same Coney Island of his childhood was no less a hotbed of iniquity, there had been the equal discovery of every eatery, joint and stand that was hot and sweet. There’d been the live performance theaters, bike rides along the water at night, boat rides to discovery inlets on the Hudson, fishing trips, and every last activity he’d grown up imagining and letting go of because it couldn’t possibly represent his future.</p><p>All of it, Bucky had seen happen for him. </p><p>“Save yur <i>money,</i> Steve,” Buck would admonish when he meant to spent their liquor earnings on comics. </p><p>“Yeh, yeh.”</p><p>But he would save for their outings, and out living it up, they’d splurge.</p><p>It all began the summer after the Empire State opening. On a Saturday afternoon in Bucky’s parents’ kitchen. </p><p>Someone’s cousin visiting for the summer had been prowling for Buck throughout the neighborhood for weeks. Found herself seated on the bench behind the breakfast table that afternoon with Bucky. There’d been whispers and smiles. He’d come by to borrow comic books — funnies were out and pulps were here to stay — and was lingering. And then Bucky had slipped his hand up the girl’s shirt and the girl hadn’t clobbered Bucky or anything. Instead she’d turned bright red and started gasping ever so softly, running her hands down Bucky’s face and whispering, “Bucky, oh . . . <i>Bucky,</i>” he would <i>never</i> forget the sound of that, and then was suddenly shrieking in rage. It was so startling a transition that he didn’t realize she was hollering at <i>him.</i> He’d been standing there transfixed. Eyes strained, mouth open, face on fire. Buck had been fifteen and him fourteen and it had been as close as he had come to touching tits. Comic books scattered at his feet, he’d nearly broken his bones hurrying out of there ahead of the shrieks and purse dodging. </p><p>He and Buck and laughed over that one for days. </p><p>Well, Buck had, he’d . . . gone home and done things.</p><p>But there they were. Suddenly, officially, in the dating game. And as with everything else, Bucky would not let him go it alone.</p><p>Oh, it pissed everyone off. Guys who couldn’t get the kinda double dates he could, dames who seemed to have lost the bet, and as they grew older, even hopeful parents. Made no difference to Bucky. He could count on one hand and still have fingers left the number of times Bucky had single dated. If Buck or the dame couldn’t source a companion, the chances the date would happen dropped to near zero. And it soon became a heated, hated, fact. But Bucky didn’t care. And soon it simply became fact.</p><p>Their first date together was a real horror show. On arriving and seeing him, his date had made such a face that a hundred years later, it still hurt. He didn’t think Buck saw. But she stuck close to her friend all night and he’d stuck close to the guard rail of the water overlooking the Hudson. </p><p>Bucky soon come over, smiling. Then arm extended, a couple of over-spiced Polishes were now under his nose.</p><p>“Dare ya.”</p><p>Taking the sandwiches from Bucky, he’d resignedly smirked. “Watta yer darin’?” he asked in their practiced, sing-song tone.</p><p>“That’cha eat this an’ not fall sick, Huckleberry.”</p><p>It had made him laugh and not feel like such an outcast, what with his date over there with her friend still trying to comport herself. So he ate the Polishes. Brief date, that one, as his sinuses proceeded to pour out every ounce of nasal mucus since his birth. There was no stopping his date from booking it out of there. </p><p>“I should take him home,” Bucky languidly told his date Aya, who looked so torn at the choice before her it would have been comical were he not in danger of drowning. There were no repeat dates with Bucky Barnes, so she could consider coming home with them and seeing things she might never unsee, or let Bucky go.</p><p>Soon he and Buck had rushed him home alone and hurriedly found his ma’s supply of antihistamine. Sedated his dumb self. While Buck, breathless, took to the armchair in his bedroom and laughed himself to tears. But for respect for his ma he would’ve fought drowsiness and used every swear word known before passing out. </p><p>The last thing he remembered on the way to sedation was the brown haired boy semi-grown up to match the image in his mind, coming over to kiss his forehead. “I’ll go clean up.”</p><p>“S’uh least you cu’ do . . .”</p><p>Some dames had been kind. He remembered one in particular, Vi. She’d sat with him and talked and listened and even laughed when he cracked jokes. But the moment Buck had started in on his date, getting hot and heavy across from them in the promenade booth, Vi had vanished. Quite smoothly, he might add.</p><p>Sitting there awkwardly, he’d tried not to look over. But of course had, repeatedly,  once to catch Buck smiling hotly at him. He’d quickly looked away, not wanting to seem desperate.</p><p>By and large, Bucky in the dating pool had been carnage. In the 360 degree memory he’d been gifted by Dr Erskine, he could look around the neighborhood and see Bucky’s tall, broad and endlessly self-assured self. Patient and kind, attentive to all, his <i>chawklet hair</i> when his ma would let him grow it out waving in any dame’s direction and driving them crazy, and when the <i>marhble eyes</i> would follow, cause Buck did like girls, they’d come crying to him. <i>“He’s sucha swee’har. </i> And they really would cry, coming over, trembling and clutching him, invisible him. <i>Tell Bucky I’m heya for him. Yeh hear me, Steve?”</i> And he would nod, feeling for them as much as for himself. For their anguished desire to be with Bucky, who would spend time and money but not much else on them, and for himself who was doorman to one James Buchanan Barnes, taking ladies’ names and grievances alike.</p><p>He could happily say, he did his patriotic duty and kept up. Couldn’t charm, couldn’t dance, couldn’t sing, couldn’t make a dame feel better than he himself had that morning waking up. But he could eat and he could drink and there was no dare low enough. Didn’t matter that he could see the bad ending, Buck looked at him and mumbled it, and he launched. Assured their dates that a striptease was indeed cultural in many parts of the world, like a bellydance, only to be the one in their foursome with his heart nearly packing up from shock and excitement; smoked cigars in bars that made him cough more than his dates. Blushing when Bucky would so warmly place a hand on his back that he’d turn to see where it was coming from, reddening even more when Bucky would drop a kiss to his temple. “I love you, buddy,” he’d hear, hot and fast in his ear.</p><p>And what would that do? Why fortify him for the next round of mayhem, of course.</p><p>He didn’t know about those girls, but Buck had shown him the time of his life.</p><p>His highlight memory for the <i>end</i> of that era, of mindless happiness, had been on a steamboat date on the Hudson.</p><p>He’d been having a particularly dark day, he remembered, his mental state floundering, and honestly he would have preferred anything to Bucky trying to cheer him up. </p><p>It had rained all day. Late afternoon, he’d left the back porch, reminiscing of “simpler times” of being a kid and Bucky reading to him, and passing through the kitchen had told his ma to say she didn’t know if Bucky came asking where he was. She hadn’t answered. A couple hours later, like clockwork, here’d come the man of the hour, banging open his bedroom door and telling him he had a half hour to get ready, “Felicia got’a friend.”</p><p>Great.</p><p>Not too long after, there they were on that slippery, packed dock, him watching Buck help Felicia and her friend onto the steamboat which was rapidly filling up with couples. The boat left from Coney Island, had a restaurant up top. Buck was left to handle the girls because he was having heart palpitations about getting on the boat himself without a mishap. If he fell, forget the embarrassment, there’d sure to be broken limbs. So, after the girls, Buck had casually placed himself against the side of the boat without seeming to and he’d carefully kept his eyes on the level dock while using Bucky’s body as leverage to climb in. Between the two of them, somehow managing not to make it conspicuous. </p><p>When he looked back now he knew he’d gotten a few smiles from couples watching, but he’d dismissed them as Manhattanites or something, and who knew what they wanted.</p><p>Jammed with people, the little mechanical lift had claustrophobically taken them up four decks to the uppermost, where the restaurant and even more people awaited. Buck had greased someone’s palm and they’d gotten a nice little table by the railing. And it really had been nice and all. But as soon as Felicia’s friend began drifting, eyes and mind, he too had lowered his head and was almost immediately back in his own mind.</p><p>Eventually, he began hearing soft whispers and gasps. Looking up, he saw that evening had fallen and a pretty, low-hanging crescent moon was over the water. Yellow sail boat lights were suddenly like fallen stars on the Hudson, and on the deck a jazz band was playing. The whole thing was . . . breathtaking.</p><p>“<i>Wau,</i>” whispered his date Lea, who was German-Jewish and newly emigrated. “Dis is beautiful.”</p><p>“Yeh,” he said in soft wonder, blinking at everything. “It sure is.” </p><p>And several feet away, where Buck had moved himself and Felicia, standing behind her with his arms around her, Buck had once again turned and smiled at him.</p><p>And in a rare moment of being present, he had smiled back.</p><p>That night before they separated, he thanked Bucky. Another rarity.</p><p>After they’d walked home their dates, his actually politely kissing him on the cheek, shocking him, he and Bucky had walked back home under the incandescent street lights, him listening to Bucky talking something a securities and exchange act being passed when all he wanted was to talk about how John Dillinger too, after Bonnie and Clyde months prior, had just been killed in a bloody shootout by the the FBI. But he had only too happily listened.</p><p>At their still carrying-on block — it’d be twenty-four hours if people could help it — they’d stopped at the stoop of Bucky’s brownstone. Both of them at the bottom stair, intermittently saying hi as neighbors climbed up past them. He’d afterward cross the formerly empty lot, now garden at the side of the building to get to home as he’d been doing since he was six. </p><p>“I had a great time, Buck. And I know I don’t say it enough, so thank you.”</p><p>“Glad ya did, Steve.”</p><p>But he lingered under the rustling fall trees, and kept glancing at Bucky.</p><p>Buck at seventeen had grown up beautiful. Like everything on the inside had started showing up on the outside. His sweet soul, his kindness and patience. Everything that made every parent want him for a son-in-law. His aware, grown-up eyes now matched the rest of him, though if you asked him those eyes now bordered on fretful. But occasionally Bucky’s beauty would penetrate even his own dense mind and he’d look at him with pride. He was never envious of Bucky. You couldn’t be envious of someone who showered you with love.</p><p>Someone who smiled at you like this.</p><p>“Urgh,” he droned, dreading. “What.”</p><p>“You tell me. You’re the one with the big smile on yer face.”</p><p>“I just did. I had a great time. G’night, Buck,” he said, smiling to himself as he turned to leave. “You’re the best.”</p><p>“You think so?”</p><p>“Yeh,” he called back, grousingly.</p><p>So there had been his dating life. </p><p>And Buck had tried for him. But it hadn’t saved him from failing continually or Buck from scoring nonstop. Until much to his embarrassment, out of desperation at the age of seventeen, he’d straight up asked Bucky what sex felt like. Buck sure had told him — swinging both legs onto the kitchen table, leaning back and giving him a fine performance: demonstrating hand and hip movements, hot whispers of sweet nothings thrown in for free; and him attempting to headlock and cuff Bucky out of frustration. </p><p>And then he’d gone home and practiced. Cause you never knew.</p><p>What was obvious now, though, was that throughout their teenage years, it had been <i>him</i> Bucky had been dating.</p><p>He’d been the dame with whom Bucky had zero friction. The one who if he was worried, Bucky could make feel good. If he was sad, Bucky only had to smile. The one most taken by Bucky’s bottomless patience and steep kindness, <i>dose eyes and dem smarts.</i></p><p>He thought back on all those times Bucky would smile at him when the date was going well. Or any of those magical times they spent together in the Manhattan neighborhoods, a world away, and just the two of them. And forget it when they could make a fisherman take their money and let them stay on the boat long after their dates and the tourists were gone. They would lie on the bow, in the middle of the Hudson, and Buck would tilt his head real close to his, so close that he would feel that he was floating among the stars, and explain the Constellations to him. “Wha’ bear?” That was him. “A hunner? Yer makin’ it up.” At the time he wasn’t aware of having any particular reaction, no more than when Bucky had put his arm around him at the Empire State opening, but the moments were sunk deep into his heart.</p><p>However, time had not stood still for him to remain in mindless happiness.</p><p>The country was improving ever more under the New Deal; workers were back earning wages, food existed again. </p><p>And he and Bucky were growing older. </p><p>In his world, the play button resumed, and things had only gotten uglier.</p><p>During the school week, when he remembered where the damn place was, he honest to God tried to keep up. Tried to do what everyone else was doing, from school work to his persistence at joining school sports teams.</p><p>But he found he could do nothing. Participate in nothing. His mind and body did not match.</p><p>Meanwhile the injustices he felt so deeply continued to eat away at his core. </p><p>Having all grown up together, he had also thought that the kids in the neighborhood should have eased up on him. Instead, as they all grew older, the tendency of certain kids to bully evolved into even darker behavior. And the worst it got to be Buck’s best friend. Bucky’s dating pal. The taunts were ridiculous.</p><p>And no longer a child, he could also move through the entire borough and not just stay in their neighborhood, and soon it seemed no bully lived in Brooklyn who hadn’t personally met Steve Rogers, and no dame who hadn’t grimaced to his face.</p><p>Worse still, as with his pa, by the time he was seventeen, he had come to fully understand the difference between him and Bucky. That he would never be what Bucky was to society, never be accepted like him, never be given opportunities like him. That for him it would be the opposite reaction every time — that being when anyone cared to look. That if humane, a response of useless tolerance. But mostly it would be revulsion and dismissal. And in their community, a growing impatience at seeing him at the side of the person he was always with.</p><p>And that Bucky’s love would not shelter him from any of it.</p><p>Everything prickling at twelve and thirteen now fully arrived.</p><p>Buck had been fighting a mountain that was grinding him down. He could not outrun his despondency.</p><p>And slowly it began turning into a deep struggle to not drop out of all of it. Too much of an effort to keep himself from sliding off the rails.</p><p>But Bucky did not care. Some days Bucky would give him a little space. But on bad days . . . Bucky just seemed to know.</p><p>When he would cover his head with his pillow, crying tears what wouldn’t come, there Bucky would be, astride the community vegetable garden that used to be the empty lot between their brownstones. “Come out, <i>Steveee!</i>” Until the neighbors would yell out their back windows, <i>“Pay da bum his money already, get ‘im outta here!”</i> And if his ma was home, her sighs which he couldn’t possibly hear from across the house would finally drive him out there to go see what Bucky wanted. </p><p>Him. Bucky always wanted him.</p><p>Standing there with a kind of sad, determined look in his always mature eyes. “Been callin’ yuh.”</p><p>“Yeh, no kiddin’, Buck.”</p><p>But he was dressed, and outside, so off they’d go.</p><p>Then as life would have it, his ma got sick.</p><p>She’d been transferred to a tuberculosis ward at King’s County, and within six months had become infected. It remained his biggest heartache that his depression did not permit him to care for her when it was her turn. As she had so very much deserved. TB care in those days was either a specialized hospital or home care. Same kind of care, just different locations. She chose to stay at home, and the neighborhood women came and helped set up her room accordingly, and took charge of her care.</p><p>Tuberculosis not being an easily contractible disease, infection occurring by coughing and sneezing, and not by touching or changing the sheets or anything like that, which only required hand-washing to circumvent, they’d masked hers and their faces and there he’d be at her bedside, holding her hand and staring into her wet eyes. And all he would see, all he would <i>feel</i> was six years old all over again, and bitter disappointment with himself.</p><p>“I love you, ma,” was all he could whisper when he was with her. For days, when she first got infected, completely incapable of handling his emotions. </p><p>His insides were frozen. He was just a useless kid before her, and his inability to express himself was nothing short of a living hell.</p><p>“I love you,” he would just keep whispering. How would that have gone for his poor ma for months on end.</p><p>So of course, Bucky took care of it. One evening Bucky brought in the radio.  </p><p>Obvious, but only in hindsight to him. </p><p>So evenings when she didn’t chase them off to “go out and play,” it would be just the three of them: him and Bucky explaining ballgames and boxing matches to her, detailing why exactly the Dodgers were bums and Joe Louis the Second Coming. They’d listen to world broadcasts about what Germany was doing in Europe; to newscasts and radio plays and Big Band orchestras. And when the latest hit from those bands were particularly good, Bucky would turn her bedroom into a ballroom to dance with the ma’s taking care of her and make them all laugh.</p><p>She hadn’t needed him to talk, you see, she’d only needed to be with him. To call him sweet pea and for him to smile at her. For him to just be her child, free of his anguish. </p><p>With Bucky there, he’d been able to do that. And they had made her laugh even while the light had been fading from her eyes.</p><p>That hadn’t helped with his mental state.</p><p>During her illness, Bucky took over his care completely. Which he really hated. For one, Bucky should have been thinking only about graduating high school and getting into college. For the other, Bucky lectured all the time about his continued stubbornness over the behavior of other kids.</p><p>It was only after her death, sassing to Buck about how his ma used to care for him without all the talk, that Buck had explained to him that of course she wasn’t going to fall apart in front of him, but what did he think she cried about so many nights. “My pa,” had been his sullen reply, to Bucky simply lowering and shaking his head.</p><p>A real prize, he’d been.</p><p>The sicker his ma got, the worse his attitude became. And more and more, he began giving Bucky the slip, especially on dates, once his had disappeared.</p><p>At first he tried just making himself scarce for Bucky, coming up with all kinds of excuses to skip dates altogether, but often Bucky just wouldn’t hear it. So strategy adjusted, once ditched by his date, he’d wander off in search of more satisfying things, like trouble. Often succeeding.</p><p>It got even easier after Bucky started seriously dating this one girl Bucky liked a lot. Louisa Keller. Leeka Kallah, Bucky used to affectionally call her, which he smiled to remember. Went to Manual Training, a tough-ass high school there in Brooklyn for practical stuff, training to be a mechanical engineer. Brash and smart as a whip. Reminding him a lot of Peggy actually. She and Buck had gotten on like a house on fire. Both being book smart and all. Bucky took her as seriously as he had never seen with a dame. He’d thought she made a great gal for Bucky, told him so, and left Bucky to it. Double that since Buck was being tapped for big time college himself. Brooklyn had a storied history of sending into the wide world people in the arts and sciences and all kinds of fields who became famous, and maybe that could be Buck too. He hadn’t been about standing in the way of that.</p><p>So wouldn’t you know, rather than improving his attitude for having the most loyal friend in the world, who made him smile on days he wouldn’t think possible, he chose to avoid his stabilizing presence. Off on his own, there suddenly seemed no alleyway he crossed in which he couldn’t imagine himself taking down any number of abusive older kids. And later in his bedroom with blackened eyes and avoiding his ma, Buck would beg and beg. But it had been a waste of breath. That was him at seventeen. How he’d repaid Bucky for a lifetime of care when Bucky was now in a relationship and he had a few more hours to spare.</p><p>Not that he got into fights all the time. There’d been domestically abused kids on the streets then as now. Kids who sometimes just needed someone to talk to, convince them they really did deserve a roof over their heads. Sometimes he’d spend all day on the streets with them, finding them the nearest Salvation Army. But those kinds of activities were, who’d’a guessed, prime bully magnets.</p><p>Having watched outside the gym Bucky trained at for years, he’d sustained a belief of having picked up a few fighting skills himself. Didn’t really work that way. All he seemed to have in spades was adrenaline. Which, at least, did keep him going.</p><p>But invariably he’d find himself being made into a dishrag. And invariably, there would be Bucky, pacing down the alley, fists flying, lighting up a storm on his way down to him. Until suddenly, as throughout his life, the bullies would be off his pained body and tearing from the alley.</p><p>Which was exactly what happened in the week their teenage years, much like their childhood, came to a sudden end.</p><p>And no less than before, Bucky seemed to realize.</p><p><i>“You fuckin’ bitch!”</i> the lead one screamed that afternoon as they ran.</p><p><i>“Your mother!”</i> Buck screamed back.</p><p>Slowly wiping his mouth and nose, pretending it wasn’t coming, he turned away as Bucky turned back to him. “Steve,” Bucky cried brokenly, “what the fuck, what the <i>fuck.</i> I’ve been looking for you for hours, ever since class got out. Why the fuck are you here? Why the fuck do you do this?”</p><p>He said nothing as Bucky tried taking his hand, but he wouldn’t let him. This wasn’t second grade anymore. So Buck just got behind him, and knowing he had no choice, he started walking. In the past Bucky would march him through the back door and kitchen, shocking his ma’s heart once again. But no longer children and aware that his version of madness could easily end badly, Buck had long stopped bringing him within sight of his ma. At that point anyway she had been likely in bed, but Buck no longer took the chance.</p><p>Window pushed up, Bucky laced his hands and he climbed into his bedroom, Bucky climbing in after him and lowering the pane. Pulling the curtains and getting to work knowing the difficult night ahead. Asthma attacks had morphed into less violent, merely sustained efforts at deep breaths. Combined with his ma’s illness, Bucky had taken to sometimes just sleeping in his room. </p><p>So he got his care, water steam in his air passageways and vapor rub on his chest, Buck ragging on him the whole time. Until, both of them exhausted, him cleaned up and body soothed, Buck sat at his beside shaking a pained, baffle look at him. Turning from him, he laid down on his side, curled up and continuing to pretend he didn’t know, and if he did, he certainly didn’t care.</p><p>“Don’t get more reckless as we get older,” Bucky pleaded. “This isn’t a lunchroom. Those kids are fucked up and they’ll hurt you.”</p><p>“It’s embarrassin’ you think like that, Bucky. People went to war and you’re worried about some kid in any alley.”</p><p>“I swear to God, Steve,” Bucky sounded as if he was near tears. He wouldn’t know, he wasn’t looking. “I swear I’ll leash you to this fuckin’ door.”</p><p>He snorted.</p><p>“God damn it,” Bucky continued brokenly. And then after a while, sounding a little calmer, “Steve . . .” and at his continued silence, “Steve, <i>look</i> at me.”</p><p>But he wouldn’t.</p><p>There was silence. Then, with a sigh of resignation, “All right, move over.”</p><p>But he wouldn’t do that either.</p><p>After a beat he felt Bucky shift, moving onto his bed. He was patched up and much smaller than Bucky, but Bucky acted as though he didn’t care, his larger body all but crushing him where he occupied the center of the bed. He said nothing, enduring as long as he could, until his pained bones begged in alarm. So he shifted from under Bucky, just enough to hopefully not draw notice. Bucky sighed at the ceiling. Even without looking he could see him — long body stretched headboard to footboard, eighteen and just over six feet, pressed against his turned back like a giant oxygen tank.</p><p>“Steve, you listen to me. We’re not at war, y’hear? Sarah needs you. And I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you. Just take it easy. There’s always a future and you don’t know what it’ll bring.”</p><p>To which he said nothing at all.</p><p>Then that weekend.</p><p>Trying to play at a street game of baseball that Sunday afternoon — there were plenty of parks, but what fun was that — a couple of older guys had been making remarks about his clothing, whether he’d borrowed them from his pa’s leftovers, and over and over Buck had blocked him bodily from retaliating without trying to look like he was doing so. Seeing as the guys were on the other team and he was umpire and supposed to be impartial.</p><p>But on it went until one of them trapped his shorts as he tried to move, and down he went.</p><p>First by tangling with his own feet, then onto the asphalt, his head missing the concrete curb only by the grace of God. If he had managed to survive that, there would have been permanent damage. Buck had been kneeling at his side before he was aware he’d fallen, skin white and eyes ripped wide. “I’m okay,” he whispered, shaken, aware he had somehow avoided that head smack, “just a—” “Y— you could’a been—” “I’m <i>okay,</i> Buck.” But Bucky was gone from his side.</p><p>His entire life he had never really known what he hoped to gain from street fights with bullies. It had always just been this vague thing that needed to happen, its function maddeningly obscured. It wasn’t until that moment in his seventeenth year, lying on that asphalt with a bruised up body which was barely recovering from his previous efforts, that he had understood what he had just <i>once,</i> needed to have.</p><p>The hard, forceful satisfaction of justice swiftly served.</p><p>Catcher’s helmet cracking to the concrete, leather catcher’s mitt following, he turned his head up from where he lay in time to see Bucky stripping off his T-shirt. Sending the T-shirt shirt straight down on his play gear, Bucky’s fists were up and loose. “<i>Put ‘em up!</i>” Buck barked in no uncertain terms. “Or keep ‘em down. Your choice. Either way, you’re goin’ in the dirt where he his.”</p><p>The guy, Flynn Hogarth, he remembered was his name, pushed aside a friend  offering words of caution. Flynn raised his fists, and idiotically, approached. Bucky had everything on his side, their screams of encouragement right up to the wrath of righteousness. Bucky didn’t need any of it.</p><p>He had never seen a beating like that in his life. Outside of movies, outside of the ring, outside of being superheroes. Flynn Hogarth, that cool Sunday afternoon, quite simply did not bargain for what came for him.</p><p>It was a satisfaction unlike anything he had ever experienced. As if his entire life had been a pent up primal scream, and there finally, was his voice.</p><p>A couple days later, Flynn, out of the infirmary, approached him at the Novaks’ diner. The cops had been called, but everyone fled in the wind. He assumed that buddy with the words of caution had hung around to help the cops put him in the back of the cop car. Bruises only starting to fade, but still doing better than his own though, here came the guy muttering some crap about any apology. He’d looked up at him. “Shove off, Flynn.”</p><p>And Flynn had taken himself away. Just as someone quietly called, “Your girlfriend gonna come save ya later, Steve Rogers?”</p><p>He’d said nothing, looking spitefully out the picture window amid the smattering of laughter. Thinking, <i>He just might. So you keep talkin’.</i></p><p>And when Bucky did arrive, smoothly occupying the seat across from him in the booth and asking what he’d ordered, there followed a noticeable descent of silence.</p><p>Peace . . . and space.</p><p>Matching perfectly the feeling finally inside his head.</p><p>Every person had their own way of reacting to justice denied. For him, somehow with an affinity born and raised, street justice had been his. And Bucky had just validated who he was. </p><p>Even if he never got a serum, and even though it would have taken years for that understanding to fully sink in, as such things tended, in every sense of the word Bucky Barnes had just saved his life.</p><p>Flynn Hogarth was among the first in Brooklyn to volunteer for the War, and had died in the 107th. Being a couple years older than him and Bucky and college educated, the Army had snapped Flynn’s set up for officer training fast. Buck had been the one to tell him during the War. And no less than any of the men and women of his generation, he mourned for Flynn as well, kept always their eternal flame, and considered him a brother in arms.</p><p>Likewise, his ma. According to the Smithsonian, she’d actually become infected with tuberculosis during the Great War. Latent and unknown, all those years after she’d lost and so painfully missed his pa. Until hard work and the Depression strained her, weakening her already exhausted mind and body. Then too much exposure at the ward. Or maybe too much stress from worrying about her hothead, wayward son. Either way it was finally no longer latent.</p><p>His ma, Sarah Margaret Gallagher Rogers, fought for a year and a half. But at the end she had passed.</p><p>At least she had been at home. And at least he and Bucky had been there. Though perhaps it was more accurate to say that at least Buck had been there for him to walk out of his bedroom knowing what he was about to go face. Yet even the rageful scream of pain inside him hadn’t come out.</p><p>Seeing her finally at rest next to her beloved Joseph, he’d spent the next several weeks crying with relief inside.</p><p>Nor did Buck and Louisa make it as a couple. Like a lot of smart and talented kids from Brooklyn, she’d been snapped up by the U.S. government as soon as she graduated, and was on her way to Nevada to work on construction of the Hoover Dam before the ink had dried on her diploma. Buck had been on the same track himself. Assured by the same government officials that his own future awaited no less than Louisa’s. Back then a lot of kids got married right after high school, and a hot government job was just the ticket. But the relationship had not worked out because Buck would not leave him. Bucky had explained it in all manner of ways, but even he wasn’t that dumb.</p><p>Not long after, the world permanently changed.</p><p>He didn’t mean over matters of growing up, or over rites and phases of childhood, dating or teenage angst, imagined or real. He meant real and irreversible change.</p><p>With the situation in Europe only getting hotter, in 1940 the U.S. government instituted the draft. Truthfully, only guys like Bucky knew enough of what was going on to have pushed the rest of the airhead population of boys like him to even know they were supposed to go register. But once clear on the law, register they all did. Even though war had still very much been a vague thing. And it hadn’t mattered that, as with him, a lot of them had parents who’d just been in a great world war. It was one thing to be a kid, another to have experience. </p><p>Nonetheless there had been those for whom the draft had not been a vague notion — no less than those sensing a universe-ending interstellar event a century later. There had been those who had felt the War coming like vibrations on a spider’s web. For the rest of them, it had been vibrations maybe, but without context.</p><p>Well, in December of 1941 in the U.S., it no longer was. Japan bombed Hawaii, Hitler declared war on the U.S. within the week, and suddenly the country was at war.</p><p>The neighborhood immediately began breaking apart. That was about when even the densest of them started taking notice. Novaks’ was emptier daily. Talk of war had replaced what the next episode of the hottest radio play would be. Then gone forever by the summer of ’42 was the Brooklyn he was born in. Dames were gone, guys the same, kids with whom he grew up on the same streets simply disappearing into a great big world they hadn’t even known existed.</p><p>Despite having registered for the draft, you still had to be called up, or report to some armed forces recruitment center to be checked out for fitness. Buck was called up for training that spring after their first check-out and he wasn’t. Even then he never lost hope. Who said he didn’t stand a chance of being called up after all.</p><p>Because it couldn’t be that in this great worldwide endeavor of their lifetimes, for which it seemed he had been singularly born, for which his ma, looking down on him, could tell anyone that this was her son’s <i>ultimate</i> fight, that he would miss out. So he waited.</p><p>Meantime he went up to Camp Edwards training camp, not far north up in Massachusetts, and spent time with Buck on Buck’s day passes. Gotten one hell of a kick from seeing Buck’s chawklet tresses shorn. Bucky had been cute as a fresh recruit, his eyes like big lamps in his face. He’d asked Bucky questions, listened to training information. He never lost hope.</p><p>After initial bootcamp, during three-day or weekend passes, Buck had come straight back to Brooklyn to see Mr and Mrs Barnes, managing to fit in a couple of dates and whatever future-world exhibition. Buck had been all dreamy over, “It’s Howard Stark’s Expo,” but ask him who the hell Howard Stark was, until those Movietone reels would replay in his mind.</p><p>But superseding it all, Bucky begging him to stay home.</p><p>“Steve, please. Please, please Steve, <i>please.</i>”</p><p>But he never lost hope. Setback after setback, day after day he just kept at it. The powers that be might have declared him unfit, but no less than with dames, he’d kept his mind and body sharp in case of the day it might happen for him. He hadn’t been training, kept applying and getting rejected. But he had never lost hope. Whatever Buck learned at basic, at advanced, he siphoned. Plus, it never seemed natural that Buck would be all into something that he wasn’t. So Buck had participated, no matter how halfheartedly. It had been their way, his especially, of maintaining their lives.</p><p>But the truth was that none of it was real — not the war in Europe, not the astounding attack on Pearl Harbor, not even the draft itself. None of it was really real until the morning of Bucky’s deployment.</p><p>It was safe to say that he went into a form of shock.</p><p>For one, he slept overnight on cold wet cargo crates in the open air of Boston Harbor.</p><p>Buck wasn’t supposed to have known they was being shipped to England. Or the dock from which it was to happen, much less have told him. An officer who’d taken a liking to Bucky — and, hello there, officer he’d like to question a hundred years later — had inadvertently spilled the beans on the 107th’s initial destination. But troop movement being a war time secret, the revelation of which was a court martial offense, the fact that he’d known which dockyard to be in that morning had caused a slight raucous with harbor security, a beat cop, and the dock supervisor who’d discovered him.</p><p>Suddenly he was being yelled at by the cop and the security guy, with the dock supervisor trying to mediate, and it wasn’t even six a.m.</p><p>“Listen pal, I’m from Brooklyn. On your best day you couldn’t shake me. So you need to back off here and tone it down wit’ ya attitude.”</p><p>“Lissen to this one!”</p><p>“Get off’a me. Getcha hands off’a me. Yer’a disgrace. I did <i>nothin’</i> to ya.”</p><p>“Settle down, kid.”</p><p>“Naw, I ain’t settlin’. Ma’s Irish just like you, yet here y’are, bullyin’ yer own kind. I oughta—”</p><p>“Steve?”</p><p>He whipped around so hard at the sound of Bucky’s voice he gave himself neck strain for later. To find Buck standing there in a sergeant’s uniform — Buck who’d still only been an enlisted private on all those three-day passes —  staring at him as though he was seeing a talking platypus.</p><p>He had rushed over and locked Bucky in his arms before he realized he’d even moved. They were just suddenly, so comfortingly, once more breathing the same air.</p><p>“It’s okay, it’s fine,” he heard Bucky saying over his head. “I know him. He’s with me.”</p><p>Reliably he could amuse himself imagining what the sight must have looked like — the hallowed, glowing 1A, freshly minted as a sergeant in the US Army no less, what stronger proof of the validity of everything society had been telling him since he turned thirteen, being hugged to death by a bottom of the dregs, obvious, nearly worthless 4F.</p><p>“Steve, what the fuck’re you doin’? How’re y’here even?”</p><p>“Buck— Buck— Bucky—” he gasped, arms locked around Bucky’s body, face buried in Bucky’s shoulder, on the verge of triggering a full blown asthma attack of the kind he’d not had since age eight. </p><p>Buck had wrapped his arms around his shoulders and held him close. “It’s all right, Steve."</p><p>“Bucky, ma’ heart’s breakin’,” he’d cried helplessly, making Bucky laugh a little. </p><p>“No, it ain’t.”</p><p>“Don’t tell me what I know.”</p><p>But he couldn’t breathe. It was as though someone was tearing away the boy holding his hand when he was gasping for air.</p><p>“Bucky . . .”</p><p>“It’s okay, Steve,” Bucky said. “I’m right here.”</p><p>He remembered that. Like Bucky had read his heart.</p><p>“I got a lot to say,” he told him, so belatedly that Bucky did laugh. </p><p>“It’s all right, Steve.”</p><p>“Swear to God, Buck,” he lamented. “You just go ‘head an’ keep sayin’ that.”</p><p>It had hurt too much to bear.</p><p>Somehow the world had discovered the magical life that Bucky Barnes had gifted him, and that Bucky had so carefully and for so long protected. He was the very last person to believe in magic, but he had lived a magical life. Because of the times in which he’d grown up, and the neighborhood in which he’d lived, but most especially because of the brown haired boy who had cared for him more than he cared for his own life.</p><p>“Fuck,” he said.</p><p>And Bucky held him tight. Kissed his temple again and again, whispering that it was all going to be okay. Standing that way for a long time, as they never hugged in their lives. Until Bucky had simply pulled back. “Keep her warm for me.” Buck meant Brooklyn. Then returning toward him, Bucky wrapped him in his arms and placed one last kiss to the side of his face. “I love you, Steve,” he heard for the first time in his life. Then Bucky let him go. And then Buck was gone.</p><p>He’d found a corner somewhere and tried to cry. Oh, did he try. All he gave himself was a severe headache and heart palpitations strong enough to qualify as a near anxiety attack.</p><p>He should have been on that ship with Bucky, even if just to clean Bucky’s weapons. Instead there he was, a morose, useless piece of rag left behind on the docks.</p><p>Seven decades later he’d woken up to read in the history books that many of them, left behind like him that day, had killed themselves. He would never, ever have done such a thing. Never. In that new era, he would have found a purpose as he had done his entire life. No question it would have been to support the hell out of whatever Buck and the 107th were being sent to do. It might have taken a minute to get himself back together, but he would have found his way. It had been why, even deeper than the desire to prove himself, he’d volunteered his mostly useless body for unproven science experiments. Another move he didn’t know that he’d exactly recommend either.</p><p>Then one day against all odds he found himself in Europe — not the Pacific where he could have just as easily ended, but Europe — listening to Peggy Carter utter the words <i>the 107th.</i> To look up and confirm that he hadn’t imagined her saying the words. That from all possible permutations, he found himself sitting exactly where Bucky was.</p><p>To rush to Colonel Phillips who said he’d signed a lot of 107th casualty letters and that the name Barnes did sound familiar. But nothing in him felt that way. </p><p>The rescue of the 107th had been like a clarion call. In a new and powerful body, able to do it. To rescue Bucky and all of them. Like he was five again, and God himself, out of a profound and merciful pity had opened his palm and in it lay everything — salvation, confession, redemption; a do-over of his life. </p><p>On freeing the prisoners, when had asked after a Sergeant Barnes, and Pinky had said there was an isolation ward, he had known he would find Bucky.</p><p>And when Bucky had lucidly opened his eyes in that aid station, that would count as the one of the happiest days of his life.</p><p>The first day of the rest of his life.</p><p>But all of that had been years into the future — his ma’s death, Flynn Hogarth’s, the breaking up of their world, Buck’s deployment, that year of anguish alone in ’42. All of it had at best been prophecy.</p><p>On the evening Flynn came by to apologize, what he remembered was a thorough sense of peace.</p><p>And of the next few years, Bucky sitting across from him at Novak’s nearly every evening for a meal. Eyes fastened on him, forever more adult, warmly, sincerely looking him over while smiling at every stupid thing he said. He could look over, just blink, and make Bucky laugh.</p><p>“Ya ‘right there, Buck,” he’d ask him, whenever he himself was having a good day.</p><p>And Bucky would give him a smile, same one he’d first seen as a conquered six year old, before sending his gaze outside the window. And Buck would say, “Yeah, Steve. Yeah. I’m all right.”</p><p>And he’d answer, “That’s what I like to hear.”</p><p>—</p><p>The sun came up the same way above the clouds as on the ground. That had never ceased to amaze him. Hands at his sides, dressed in his uniform and simply standing in the middle of his quarters, he watched as it beamed golden light across the clouds. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d thought it would somehow look different up here.</p><p>But it didn’t. The sunrise was the same on the earth or in the sky. In Brooklyn nearly a hundred years ago . . . or that very morning in a steamboat in the sky. </p><p>It was people who changed. People who found out who they really were.</p><p>And no less than the sun, it was a beautiful thing.</p><p>His intercom buzzed. He reached for it.</p><p>“Cap.” It was Sam.</p><p>“I’m ready,” he said. “I’m on my way.”</p><p>•</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. PRECONCEPTIONS</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>About those threads Steve pulled...</p>
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It took a while to realize that Sam was staring at him. A while, seeing as he’d been discreetly staring at Sam since the jet reached altitude. Now Sam’s bemused expression slowly transformed into outright surprise. And when Sam lowered his eyes down his own body, brought them back up to meet his gaze, which was still stuck where Sam had left it, Sam’s eyebrows went up.</p><p>“Can I . . . help you?”</p><p>Only then was he able to break his stare, bringing his eyes back to the pad in his hand. “No.”</p><p>Sam remained as he was. Laughed a little. “Did you just— Were you just checking me out?”</p><p>“Not that I’m aware.”</p><p>“Then what the hell were you looking at?”</p><p>“Nothing.”</p><p>Silence fell in the Quinjet’s corridor. A short distance away in the jet’s cargo bay, the two SHIELD operatives Natasha was supervising were making a minor racket <i>Yes ma’am’ing</i> while securing crates of dismantled Chitauri weapons parts — their latest haul. In spite of the distraction, he knew there was no way Sam was letting the moment pass. That had been a red-handed catch. Especially with him having been dead silent on Bucky’s letters for nearly three weeks.</p><p>“Sooo . . .” Sam began, like an old song.</p><p>“Drop it,” he replied.</p><p>“You know, I do feel cheated,” Sam said. “Here I am, the good friend who got you on this, because I felt sorry for you spending the last eight months in a bad place. Cause you have been in a bad place. When Tasha and I picked you up in Wakanda, you looked like a ghost. I mean, I have trauma over that man-friend of yours, but I had to show some respect because I realized I hadn’t actually grasped how much you meant to each other. Which is why, when you started looking depressed all those weeks ago for whatever reason, I told you about his letters. I’m the one who told you about his letters, am I right?”</p><p>“You ain’t wrong.”</p><p>“Right. And maybe changed your life. And what do I get? A bunch of dumb questions, which I duly answer, and then a cone of silence.”</p><p>“You’re just upset cause you didn’t get the gossip for you and Tasha.”</p><p>“Uh, hello?”</p><p>“And you didn’t answer anything, actually.”</p><p>Sam laughed. “I did, Steve. I just can’t do all your homework for you.”</p><p>He smirked. “Bucky could.”</p><p>“Oh my God,” Sam said, laughing. Then shook his head. “But seriously, listen. Those letters are heavy business, and I have never seen you this preoccupied. You also look a little . . . I wanna say . . .” </p><p>“Preoccupied?”</p><p>“Ha. No, more like—”</p><p>“Immersed.”</p><p>Natasha strode out of the cargo hold, stopping at the entrance from where she now regarded them. </p><p>“Steve’s been looking immersed.”</p><p>He glanced at her. “I think those are the same thing.”</p><p>“There’s a difference,” she said. Staring for a second, she lifted her chin at him. “Sam says you found some letters Bucky Barnes wrote during the war and it’s what’s got you burrowed in your quarters and lost in space.”</p><p>“Lost in space,” he repeated, so they could hear themselves.</p><p>“Preoccupied,” Sam repeated, diplomatically.</p><p>“Immersed,” Natasha said, leaving. “And lost in space.”</p><p>She continued out of the corridor, while he kept his eyes on the pad and hoped Sam would leave the topic. Although he couldn’t help distractedly rubbing an eye. Bucky’s letters and his own . . . preoccupied thoughts aside, he’d spent the last couple of weeks having incredibly unusual dreams.</p><p>“Sexy dreams?”</p><p>He glanced up, not aware of having spoken. Sam was back to raised eyebrows at him, having mumbled the question in hushed, conspiratorial tones.</p><p>“No,” he felt obliged to answer. “Strange and . . . dark.” <i>Savage, ferocious. Homicidal.</i> “Like I’m on a mission to . . . bring someone down . . . Like a nemesis or something.”</p><p>“You have a nemesis?” Sam asked, sounding surprised.</p><p>“Didn’t know I did . . .”</p><p>Closing his eyes for a second, he tried once more to see the enemy he’d been so bent on destroying. An enemy that felt so deeply personal but whose identity he didn’t even know. Or even why he was fighting them. As though he had been called up for duty he wasn’t aware he had. But called up, he had never felt as unmerciful in his life. It was almost as if he was having someone else’s dream. Dreams were strange that way. But it was no use. He still couldn’t capture anything beyond flashes of dark terrain and violence. Images of the Red Skull kept flashing, but he knew it hadn’t been Johann Schmidt he’d been chasing. Bringing down Schmidt had never felt that deeply personal. Thoughts of Bucky kept crossing as well, but he knew that to just be his mind tangling unresolved rage over Bucky’s Hydra imprisonment.</p><p>Not to mention all the other reasons thoughts of Bucky would be interfering.</p><p>“Anyway,” he said to Sam. “It’s been days. Seems gone, whatever it as. And good riddance.”</p><p>“Hm,” Sam said. “So it’s not the reason you’ve been preoccupied.”</p><p>“We’ve all been busy,” he said evasively.</p><p>“Is that right,” Sam replied. “Well, don’t come knocking at three a.m. if you’re not gonna share now.”</p><p>He smiled. “But you know I will.”</p><p>Sam hid a smile, shaking his head. </p><p>They landed on the Helicarrier early evening, white lights blazing across the flight deck. They’d been gone four days. Four days of chasing meager leads from the factory installation they’d discovered reverse-engineering Chitauri weapons three weeks ago.</p><p>Four successful mission days.</p><p>If only the same could be said for his personal life.</p><p>Turned out, being in love this time around was . . . proving a little different than he remembered.</p><p>The whine of the jet engine sharply decreasing, the Quinjet powered down as both security and personnel hurried across the deck to begin moving out their cargo.</p><p>At the base of the jet’s ramp, he watched as the two operatives under Natasha’s supervision having a moment in the spotlight, immediately  bossing around the squad of grunts there to move the crates, as though having personally accomplished the raid. Their Chitauri weapons mission was apparently the hot draw of SHIELD assignments, and evidently meant to be shoved in people’s faces.</p><p>While he stood there quelling the urge to tell them off — these days finally understanding Bucky’s admonitions on the difference between scrawny little Steve Rogers haranguing people, versus Captain America speaking — another Quinjet began noisily landing a short distance away. </p><p>Even after the new Quinjet’s engines had died to a soft whine, he was still looking at it.</p><p>Not entirely sure why his attention was caught, he gave it a second and realized that it was because the jet’s serial number, stenciled on its tail, didn’t belong to their Helicarrier.</p><p>Interesting, to say the least, since Helicarrier Number Sixty-Four was supposed to be the only one in existence.</p><p>The newly arrived jet’s ramp lowered, and down walked the SHEILD deputy director he didn’t know but whom he always saw in the company of ex-SHIELD operative Richard Jones. And then following behind him, none other than the very operative with whom he had no idea why he was entangled.</p><p>Richard Jones came down the ramp dressed in SHIELD uniform same as the deputy director. Same as him and his team, same as every other SHIELD operative. Also noteworthy for an operative SHIELD’s database listed as not only low-level, but former. Encouraged after the break up of SHIELD to form his own intel-focused organization and supposedly only able to cobble together transport by occasionally hopping aboard their Helicarrier.</p><p>But he was seeing two SHIELD uniforms and a brand new Quinjet, indicating they weren’t taking that jet out for a spin but rather were in progress on a mission.</p><p>He really disliked working for spy agencies.</p><p>Catching up with his director buddy, Richard Jones clapped the director on the back, moving his head close to whisper, then simply turned his head and cut a gaze across the entire flight deck to instantly meet his eyes. As though aware of his gaze and knowing precisely where it was coming from across the bustling flight deck. The deputy director only momentarily followed after the operative’s gaze, but Richard Jone’s appraisal didn’t as quickly leave him. First the look, then the loading, knowing smirk.</p><p>“Hey, Steve.”</p><p>Natasha had come up beside him. Cherry-red bob flying in the wind, it strongly contrasted her very present eyes, very querying tone as she spoke.</p><p>“Isn’t that that guy you asked me about some time back?”</p><p>“Yeah, what of it?”</p><p>“Ever notice the way he looks at you?”</p><p>He didn’t say anything.</p><p>She turned to him. “Were you able to get any answers about him?”</p><p>“Not really.”</p><p>Meaning to ignore the newcomers, especially with Natasha there, he found couldn’t and was instead discreetly watching as the two men headed not for flight operations, which was the default entry into the Helicarrier, but towards an open cargo bay entrance. The very destination their weapons haul was being moved.</p><p>Natasha continued. “Why were you asking? I don’t think I ever asked.”</p><p>Lowering his eyes to his pad, he realized he’d actually gone over all the information in it with Sam and couldn’t use it as a distraction. And knowing Natasha wasn’t going to leave without an answer, he glanced sideways at her. “Cause I noticed the way he looks at me.”</p><p>She quirked a slow smile, her eyes still on Richard Jones. “You asked me about him the second he was on board. You knew him from before but you’re still not saying.”</p><p>It was at times like this that he wished he could fib. But what good would that be with Natasha anyway. “I know he’s supposed to be ex-Shield,” he offered. “Formed some global intel outfit after Triskelion going down.”</p><p>Natasha was quiet, her eyes not having moved. “Does he look ex-Shield to you?”</p><p>At the cargo bay entrance, the two men were doing a poor job of loitering, as though on other business, when both were clearly carefully watching the crates being moved inside like it was their job. He began wondering if he should find it mere coincidence that the pair had arrived to meet their cargo.</p><p>“Shield is up to something,” he said flatly. “It’s not just about them withholding intel.”</p><p>She tilted her head. “But then we knew that when we decided to come back,” she said causally. “However unofficially.”</p><p>Then she turned to him. </p><p>“So what’s in Bucky Barnes’s letters? Who’s the love interest? I’ll be honest, I was shocked when Sam said something about <i>the</i> girl. Back then I thought it was just Peggy Carter. You been holdin’ out on me, Steve Rogers?”</p><p>“Literally not gonna say a word in response to anything you just said.”</p><p>Her slow smile returned. “Take your time.”</p><p>Even after Natasha left he continued watching the two men at the cargo bay.</p><p>He’d ducked the word “know” with Natasha because — aside from his inexplicable encounter with the operative in the Netherlands — he really didn’t know him. He knew him only in the capacity of an operative at a location during his very early missions with SHIELD. Just a voice on comms confirming or denying intel. And then actually once seeing him at SHIELD headquarters, in formation with other supposedly low-level operatives when Rumlow had taken him on a walk-thru to meet field support. At which time he had conveyed his thanks to them in person. Rick had been among the team. That was it. </p><p>So that, had he anything less than perfect recall, he would have convinced himself that what Rick had done to him in the Netherlands, physically appearing as <i>Bucky</i> somehow, was just a bizarre dream he’d had after waking up into a new century and remembering all over again that Bucky was gone. Even more bizarre, because that man had never spoken to him before or since. Only smirking at him at any given opportunity. And, apparently, rising in SHIELD’s ranks. However unofficially. </p><p>Nothing about that operative was right. Especially the way SHIELD handled him.</p><p>With all the crates now in, the pair by the entrance disappeared into the cargo bay. And as the bay doors lowered behind them, Richard Jones once more turned a last look over his shoulder at him.</p><p>
  <i>“Cap.”</i>
</p><p>Aware that it wasn’t the first time he was hearing Sam’s call, he handed his pad to the nearest operative while his mind reeled back until it heard the question. “Yeah,” he answered. “I could eat. I’ll see you in the mess hall.”</p><p>—</p><p>Four days ago, he’d left his quarters after thinking of home.</p><p>After reading Bucky’s letters weeks ago and stammering through his first message to him following — messy from near uncontrollable exhilaration, but that had been attempt number three so at that point he’d just sent it — he’d been ready to immediately sit and pour his heart out in subsequent messages.</p><p>Lord, had he wanted to tell Bucky what was going on with him. That he’d read his letters and could he just wake up and . . . Well, all kinds of currently useless things. A month ago, even the very morning he’d first accessed the letters, he would have recorded those messages without a second thought. Without deeper consideration as to what hearing something like that might mean in Bucky’s own life.</p><p>Or even in his own.</p><p>Instead, he was proud to say that for probably the first time in his life, he had hit the pause button on himself.</p><p>Stopped himself from so much as mentioning his letters. Because he could no longer afford to be self-absorbed and unaware. This was too big, too life-changing, and he hadn’t wanted to take a step forward unless he looked at himself. Unless he understood what kind of person he had been and the things he had done. Until he knew the person he would be offering Bucky. And so he had done what he hadn’t wanted since waking from the ice. He had taken himself home.</p><p>It hadn’t been pretty. Not from where he stood.</p><p>What he had put Bucky through, what he had put his ma through. He could only shake his head. Regarding her he would always carry sorrow and regret. And the hope that wherever she was with his pa, they could both forgive their kid. As for Bucky — that Buck remained his friend was a true testament to what one person could be to another. He’d deserved nothing Bucky had given him. Not one thing. Even he knew love wasn’t some impervious thing, that like anything else it could die a horrible death from poison. And he sure had done his best to kill the love Bucky had for him.</p><p>Of course, it had only taken a hundred years, a world war, letters Bucky had to pour himself into, all topped off by a miracle of science rocketing him into an alternate future world, in which Steve Rogers was a superhero on playing cards, for him to get a clue. A world where every scrap of his life had been scrutinized by everybody — except himself. And no, the irony wasn’t lost on him that it had been waking into one of Bucky’s future worlds that got the job done.</p><p>But taking himself home had been just the ticket. And he had accomplished the task he had set out for himself. He had seen himself. And it had left him with a crystal clear affirmation. Not that he didn’t already know. But it never hurt to see yourself in a more self-aware light, to suffer a severe ego bruising, to have it sink. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how much Bucky meant to him, it was that he hadn’t valued at all how much Bucky cherished him. And because of that callousness he had caused Bucky a lot of pain. </p><p>But as life would have it, now their roles were reversed. And although the circumstances were heartbreaking, however bittersweet, it also felt fantastic. Like he had become Captain America all over again, except this time just for Bucky.</p><p>When he had fallen in love with Peggy, he had gone on a journey outside of himself. Met someone of a kind he had never before, who lit up parts of his brain he hadn’t known existed. His life with her would have been thrilling to the end.</p><p>With Bucky, it was different. With Bucky he was going home. As though he had spent his entire life searching for what, he didn’t know, as if simply lost.</p><p>But now he thought of Bucky and was submerged in the feeling of being whole. Now he understood what flooded him when he looked into those eyes. Why it felt as if the ground had turned to water. Why even what had always been a formless world to him nonetheless had a center.</p><p>That he had fallen in love with a man hadn’t alarmed him, which felt like that should have been his reaction. He really didn’t know how he could be in love with someone of the same sex all of a sudden. If at all it was sudden. But that it was Bucky made so much sense that frankly, it would have felt dishonest to question it.</p><p>And honestly, he was past caring about things like that. In fact if Bucky needed him to transform into a dame for them to be together, he’d probably give it serious thought. And ask Bucky to come along for the ride actually. Because why not? If after so improbably stealing life together for two separate centuries in bodies and minds that were right out of their ‘30s science fiction comic books, if they weren’t up for an adventure of their own making, in this space no less, he’d argue they were doing it wrong. Definitely being unappreciative of the wonders of life. </p><p>Because theirs had definitely not been the average story. </p><p>He imagined sitting his ma’s kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, Bucky trying to explain to her what their future held — that they would both sleep like fairy tale princesses and wake up far into the future, a future even more astonishing than anything in the exhibitions, except wake up as superhero and supervillain.</p><p>“Well, no surprises there,” he could hear his ma commenting, in her acerbic wit. “You’ll make a fine superhero, Bucky Barnes.”</p><p>Indeed.</p><p>So how much odder could becoming dames together really be. And seeing as they were both <i>attracted</i> to dames, it might not only work, but prove quite spectacular.</p><p>So. Having done the difficult and occasionally embarrassing job of self-examination, and grateful for where it had brought him, he’d spent the four days on their mission thinking of little else besides Bucky.</p><p>Having identified his feelings for him. Then having to think about . . . the . . . other part.</p><p>The physical part.</p><p>Had he and Bucky indeed been dames, it would have already been carnage in his head. Based on how he thought it would work at least.</p><p>Instead for two solid days he’d been gripped with thoughts of <i>Could he do it?</i> Did he <i>want</i> to do it? <i>How</i> did you do it?</p><p>Well, his answers had been yes, yes, and let’s find out.</p><p>So on completing their raid and at the first opportunity for a shuteye, he’d taken himself straight to his cabin, to the nearest bed inside his head . . . with Bucky in it.</p><p>A tiny part of him had put up a protest. That doing this might not be right. That it might be a violation of Bucky’s privacy or something along those lines. Seeing that, as far as Bucky knew, they were still only childhood friends. Good or bad, that fight had been lost even before it got started. He sometimes fantasized about Natasha and he saw her every day; she had no idea and it hadn’t affected their relationship. Besides, with Bucky it was legitimate and important . . . practice.</p><p>It would be his very first time imagining such things, and the thought had been — whatever a hundred times above exciting was.</p><p>So with the drone of the Quinjet’s vibrations in his ears, a perfect distancing from the rest of the crew, he’d pulled Bucky down to him like someone starving let into a feast. Just closed his eyes and . . . let it happen.</p><p>Nothing had happened. </p><p>Not a trickle, not a sizzle. No spark. In fact the excitement with which he’d taken to the bunk simply evaporated.</p><p>He’d lain there for a long time. First with his eyes open, then believing that to be the problem, closing them, then opening them again as still nothing happened, to simply stare blankly at the cabin’s steel ceiling.</p><p>Starting over, he’d imagined Bucky lying next to him, his smile, his eyes looking patiently down at him. The way it would feel to see that. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have material to work it. He’d had more physical interaction with Bucky than with all the women he had ever slept with combined. Touching Bucky, holding him, even as of recently kissing him, were memories he had in every flavor.</p><p>He knew what Bucky felt like, smelled like — showered or otherwise; he knew the feel of Bucky’s legs tangle with him and the pressure perilously close to his groin as Bucky pushed upright from him after they’d fallen into a foxhole together. He knew what Bucky’s arms felt like tightening to pull him around from a bully’s reach while Bucky took on their adversary himself. Or the gust of breath on his face when he’d made him laugh unexpectedly. And even that hair all those dames had cried to run their fingers through, he’d felt when Bucky would bend to drop a kiss to his forehead before leaving to go whisper with his ma.</p><p>There was no need even to concentrate. It was all just there, constantly surrounding him.</p><p>But when he brought it all together — Bucky’s hands on him, Bucky’s legs moving against his own, Bucky’s eyes and smile . . . </p><p>He did not get . . . hot.</p><p>He couldn’t even picture it.</p><p>Couldn’t imagine Bucky . . .</p><p><i>What, Steve?</i> he’d lain there thinking, stunned with surprise. <i>Taking advantage of you?</i></p><p>Did he want to do it? He only had to feel the response from his heart to know his answer. </p><p><i>Could</i> he do it?</p><p>Apparently not.</p><p>Astounded and confused, he’d remained as he was for a long time.</p><p>The same heart doing free falls at the thought of lying next to Bucky, now switching gears, just sat there like a panting puppy not knowing what to do with itself.</p><p>Fearful that he’s somehow lost the ability to get excited, like from some kind of radiation from the Chitauri weapons or something, he’d started thinking about women — hardly mattered which — and had instantly felt himself responding. Frankly, he’d only got as far as anatomy and he’d been good to go.</p><p>Then in desperation he had paraded every good-looking guy he knew, starting with Sam all the way through Thor. Unsurprisingly, even less happened. He hadn’t even been able to see their faces, only hearing their voices passing through in his head.</p><p>It had seemed impossible. To feel what was happening inside him and not . . . have it work physically.</p><p>He’d even sat up on the bunk, just to check that he was conscious and not in some odd dream. And he had pictured Bucky right there in his cabin, sliding open the steel door, having come from his own cabin, and walking in. Feeling everything he felt in his heart, now imagining Bucky standing there. Him standing up and going over to him. Taking him in his arms and kissing him, like in the infirmary down the corridor. Well, he hadn’t put his arms around him then but he’d kissed his face. His first time ever. So he was saying he couldn’t just from there kiss his mouth? He tried again and pictured it. Moving his lips from Bucky’s temple, lower. </p><p>But he couldn’t see it. And all thoughts of holding him accomplished was to accelerate his heart. None of it seemed connected with any physical part of him outside of his heart.</p><p>When he again put his mind to it, looked at his bed and thought of pulling Bucky to it, getting in there with him . . . he was . . . having to fill in with memories of being with dames.</p><p>He simply couldn’t see him and Bucky in there, together.</p><p>It had been among the most miserable, bizarre experiences of his life.</p><p>Not what he’d been expecting leaving his quarters four days ago.</p><p>And there hadn’t been enough time on the mission to do anything more than register stunned surprise.</p><p>Now in his quarters, undressed to his T-shirt and cargos, he sat on the sill of the bay windows staring down at the floor.</p><p>Was it something that took practice? Getting used to a male form or something? It was what had had him staring at Sam for a couple of days, even though Sam was only now noticing.</p><p>His intercom buzzed. He reached over and pushed to answer. “Go ahead,” he said to whomever it was.</p><p>“Uh, did you forget something?” Sam asked.</p><p>“I doubt it,” he replied.</p><p>“This is why you’re up in the middle of the night when normal people are sleeping. Food, Steve.”</p><p>“Aw, shoot. Right. Are you still in the mess hall?”</p><p>Sam laughed his one-of-us-is-crazy laugh. “No, Steve, it’s pushing midnight. Unlike you Super Soldier types, I can’t empty out my tank for days and then guzzle up. Plus we have an early call tomorrow. I’m just calling cause no one’s seen you since we landed. Get some food in you, Cap.”</p><p>“Thanks, Sam.”</p><p>—</p><p>Yasmin was the late-shift cafeteria worker’s name, the one who gave off vibes that the fall of Alexander Pierce and old SHIELD was the official end of the good old days. New SHIELD not being opaque enough, he supposed. He also got the feeling that Yasmin felt superheroes were the real problem. All except Iron Man, of course. But maybe him specifically, since apparently the perks were better at the Triskelion. Nothing overt, but who threw shade better than him. He could feel it without even paying attention. </p><p>So there he was inside the mostly empty cafeteria, once more listening to the latest missive, when he was suddenly overcome with the feeling that he was being watched.</p><p>The sensation bloomed inside his head like a soft breath.</p><p>Taking a step back, he looked toward the wide open entrances to the mess hall, whose steel doors were rolled back to open up the space. All he saw was a section of empty corridor. Due to his presence in the cafeteria often causing a small stir, he tended to time meals after shift changes to miss the crowds. Seeing nothing at the entrance, he sent his gaze around the hall. </p><p>Except for straggling skeleton crews, the hall was large, dim, and mostly empty.</p><p>But that hadn’t been a feeling he didn’t know.</p><p>Leaving his trays with Yasmin altogether, he took a slow walk toward the entrance. Not that he expected that if someone was watching him they’d be hanging around, but it never hurt to check.</p><p>Outside the cafeteria, the long corridor was equally dim, and completely deserted.</p><p>When he returned to the counter, Yasmin didn’t continue from where he’d left off, and instead stood there dishing food and apprehensively side-eyeing him. If Yasmin uttered the words “Sokovia Accords,”, he’d flip trays.</p><p>But he got his food without mishap of any kind, and thanking Yasmin, took his tray to a table on the other side of the hall. From where he’d have a near one-eighty view without having to shift focus.</p><p>On its port side, the cafeteria was bordered by the repair deck, sound-proofed and separated by large glass windows. Taking a seat, he took a moment to watch repairs being carried out on a turbine propeller, sparks flying like grounded fireworks. Like a miniature Fourth of July on the Hudson. Also a fine portrait of what was going on inside him.</p><p>Sitting back, trays forgotten for the moment, he surveyed the dim hall, his mind wandering.</p><p>This whole thing had begun because Sam had used the word <i>unrequited.</i> In that Bucky’s letters read so. On his own he never would have seen it that way. Never been able to shift from his own perspective to see himself through Bucky’s eyes. It had taken a stranger.</p><p>But having failed at what should have been a natural next step into things he felt soaked to his eyeballs in, he’d had to ask himself the glaring question. </p><p>Was the whole thing just his imagination because of what Sam had said? </p><p>Was he weaving a fantasy without basis in reality, and because he’d always been a realist, the rest of him wasn’t going along?</p><p>Growing up they’d heard of the boys, and then as they grew older, the young men, who “fell in love” with other young men, being how the worldly kids would whisper it. With everyone claiming to keep their distance. But not once had he ever glanced over and seen Bucky looking at a guy that way. From puberty to their early twenties, daily together, not once. He himself had only managed it a couple of days before getting caught by Sam. So the likelihood that he wouldn’t remember, even if he hadn’t recognized at the time what he was seeing? Next to none. </p><p>Then how about toward him specifically. Bucky had certainly never looked at him that way, and it seemed nearly impossible that Bucky could have shown that level of restraint their entire lives.</p><p>And then what about himself? Putting aside that he had never developed feelings for a guy, he had never reacted to any physical interaction between him and Bucky the way he would had a dame touched him with a fraction of the intensity. He was busy imagining that he’d been Bucky’s special girl, that all those dates had secretly been about him. And he very much liked the idea of thinking back to all those times in the War when he would smile and make Bucky blush. All those comments Bucky would make throughout their lives comparing his smile to whatever passed through his head. Yet none of those dates had prompted any physical response in him toward Bucky, even when he would watch Bucky making out with his dates. </p><p>Although . . . the comments about his smile used to make him feel pretty good inside, he remembered, smiling at his trays. And he could listen to Bucky pop out comparisons all day. And apparently fall more in love without realizing it.</p><p>Which brought up another possibility — that he was just in love with the idea of being in love with Bucky. Because it neatly clicked, and explained so much. Sated a deep desire to make things up to Bucky which he was now happy to put on a track and call something that wasn’t true.</p><p>Yeah, Buck’s letters were hot stuff to him. But the fact was also that until accessing those archives, he had never actually read a single letter Buck ever wrote. So maybe this was how Buck wrote about everyone. Buck had always been literary, so maybe this was how all literary people wrote letters. Made their reader feel good inside as if it was written specifically for them. He’d certainly felt that way as a kid about Robert Louis Stevenson, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t the inspiration for his favorite book as a kid. Yet had someone rolled up on his back porch and told him that the hero kid was secretly based on him, he would have felt that truth all the way down.</p><p>So was that his reality? Complete fiction?</p><p>His food had mostly cooled. But he couldn’t touch any of it. Instead he was feeling his heart pulsing deeply, slowly. Beating with a searing sensation, as if the hot glowing propeller in his side vision was his heart being cauterized. </p><p>No less than being watched, he knew what the feeling was. It was his heart calling bullshit on him.</p><p>No matter what else he was, he wasn’t delusional. Whether or not he had ever seen Bucky look at a guy in the way he apparently needed to justify his own feelings, what Bucky had not needed to explicitly write in those letters was what he had been feeling for Bucky his entire life. What did explain their lives. What they meant to each other. The letters reverberated that Bucky was in love with Steve, and if you’re Steve and reading this and you don’t get it, there’s no helping you. There was a reason Bucky had addressed them to his little sister.</p><p>Bucky had captured all of his own unspoken feelings. And he wasn’t going to use his personal inability to envision them together as an excuse to ignore that. That time was past. </p><p>Whatever else, he <i>was</i> a realist, had never lived in a fantasy world. In the morning he’d figure out his life.</p><p>—</p><p>Morning sunshine washed across the flatscreens in the secure communications room his team used for mission planning. Him, Sam and Natasha stood viewing security footage from their raid on the scientists’ factor installation weeks back. Footage SHIELD was only now releasing to them.</p><p>Hooking back up with SHIELD had definitely made operations smoother, weapons storage easier, intel more accessible, and maybe their entire mission more effective overall, since now they handed their detained to SHIELD rather than to local authorities who likely just released the prisoners once they left airspace. </p><p>But the collaboration was typically one-sided. Not only was SHIELD then not allowing them access to their own prisoners for questioning, security footage and other mission related items were also immediately classified at director-only level. Unless declassified to them, they were left waiting like civilian consultants or something. With the bureaucracy around declassification itself enough to have Sam, who’d never previously dealt with SHIELD, turning a visible shade of purple.</p><p>Or was that <i>violet.</i></p><p>He’d wanted to fight their situation, but Sam had advised he let it go for now. Better to clean up while they could and confront Nick Fury later.</p><p>The result was that they had to take any intel as-given, and hadn’t been able to ask those scientists about what was clearly a major initiative on alien weapons tech. Or where their fear of “future” alien invasions was coming from.</p><p>Watching the footage whirling across several screens, they were keeping their eyes peeled for clues to trace any of the heavily anonymized suppliers and mercenaries who’d kept the factory in business.</p><p>“Okay, so they’re not going to have insignia or anything like that to make our jobs easier.” This was Natasha, eyes squinted at the surveillance video. “But if you pause there— pause, pause—” Sam paused. “You see that?” He did. Sam, not so much. “You can see the winged-sword patch on the uniform of that one idiot who wasn’t paying attention in how to lose your affiliation class.”</p><p>He looked at the image frozen on the screen. It was quite a catch.</p><p>“Good work, Tasha.”</p><p>“I don’t see it,” Sam said. However, Sam would always defer to both their observations.</p><p>“Can you track the insignia?” he asked Natasha.</p><p>“Done. I could tell you right now, but I wanna double check. This’ll take a minute.”</p><p>“We’ll be ready.”</p><p>Natasha got up to leave. At the door, she stopped, turned to him and said, “You’re on a countdown to tell us what’s going on with you.”</p><p>“Or what?” he asked.</p><p>She tossed her hair, smiled coyly at him. “Or I’ll find out, of course. And I’m looking forward to it. Cause from all indications, this one’s a scorcher.”</p><p>Natasha left, and he waited until the door swished closed, the red light coming back on overhead to indicate secured communications once more. Then he sent a glance Sam’s way. </p><p>Sam was still staring at the screens, looking shaken. </p><p>“Are you seeing the size of that place?” Sam said. “And all that talk about the right to protect themselves from an alien invasion? Sorry, do you mean the one that nearly leveled New York and where all your stuff came from in the first place? Or are you talking about another, probably more devastating one we don’t yet know about?” Sam tightened his lips. “Sometimes I wonder whether I wasn’t better off when I didn’t know about things like this.”</p><p>“Yeah . . .” he said, taking a seat on the desk beneath the monitors. Then, sensing he ought to say a little more than that, “Tony was always talking about protecting the planet from alien invasions ever since Shield had to deal with Thor and Loki destroying that town in New Mexico. But I agree this isn’t the way to do it.”</p><p>Even to his own ears he sounded on autopilot. Standing next to him, Sam slid him a knowing look but didn’t reply. Sighing, Sam then took a seat at the terminal, activated it and began updating intel for their upcoming mission.</p><p>For a while he didn’t interrupt. Then he sent Sam a quick look. </p><p>“Can I ask you a question?”</p><p>Sam laughed. Briefly, richly. “Did you finish reading the letters?”</p><p>He frowned. “Of course. I asked you questions about them, remember?”</p><p>“Exactly. <i>I</i> know what I think about them, but I have no idea what you do. You won’t tell anyone. Make faces when anyone kindly asks. But now you wanna ask me a question. <i>Another</i> question.”</p><p>“That’s right,” he said, maintaining a low voice in spite of them being in an eavesdrop-proof room. “So here’s my question. You’re into dames, right?”</p><p>Sam slowed almost invisibly, taking a long, fortifying breath. With his enhanced ability at sight, he saw it almost in slow motion, before Sam resumed typing.</p><p>“So what if in theory,” he said. “You woke up one day and thought Thor, or Tony, or Clint were attractive. What would you do? This is just a hypothetical. So you can answer honestly.”</p><p>“Of course it is,” Sam said lightly. “And apropos of nothing.”</p><p>He waited while Sam typed away, fingers flying over the keyboard as if trying to dump thoughts before they disappeared. While he stayed patient and quiet, as Sam would get ornery in case of interruption. Until Sam finally said, “Nothing.”</p><p>It took a second to realize that was Sam’s answer. “Nothing? Baloney. I don’t buy it.”</p><p>“You don’t have to.”</p><p>He stared at Sam, who, still entering information, appeared completely serious. “Seriously?”</p><p>“Yeah. Cause I’m not a virgin from another century and it wouldn’t be the first time in my life I found someone attractive.”</p><p>“Of— the—”</p><p>“Yeeeesss.”</p><p>“Seriously?”</p><p>Sam didn’t answer. He watched Sam for a moment, then lowered his voice even more. “Who was it? Do I know?” Sam just worked faster. “You don’t wanna tell me?” Then he blinked, adrenaline suddenly slamming him. “It- it isn’t Bucky, is it?”</p><p>Sam stopped completely, staring dead-eyed at the screen. “Holy shit,” Sam breathed. “I am so embarrassed for you right now. If this wasn’t happening to me, I wouldn’t believe it. No, Steve, it wasn’t Bucky. Much to your continued shock, I’m sure, the world doesn’t in fact revolve around Bucky Barnes.”</p><p>He snorted. “Shows what you know.” Then he leaned in closer. “Okay, so— let’s say rather than doing nothing, you wanted to do something.”</p><p>“You’re a little in my personal space right now, Steve . . . We’re in a secured room, you can yell if you like . . . ”</p><p>He ignored Sam. “So how do you start? How does someone from a different century start becoming . . . twenty-first century . . . and . . . fluid.” He paused, his eyes on Sam. “That’s the word, right?”</p><p>“Stop. Please God, just stop. This is painful. I’m trying to wrap up, and I don’t have time for this.”</p><p>“How much time could it possibly take?” When Sam didn’t answer. “It’ll take one second. I just need your honest take on it. Where do I go to start . . . seeing things a little differently?”</p><p>“The internet? Pretty sure there’s video you could look at. Stuff that might even be okay for your Victorian eyeballs. And while I’m aware that video was after your time . . .” </p><p>“Come on. I need real answers.”</p><p>Sam still didn’t offer any. Then, “You’re sure you want to have this conversation?”</p><p>“I need to.”</p><p>“Then go ahead,” Sam said knowingly.</p><p>“What I’m asking is— is it possible to— you know . . .” </p><p>“Be flattered . . .”</p><p>“But not have . . . you know . . . not be able to— For instance, when it happened to you. Did you automatically wanna— you know— ”</p><p>“If you say <i>you know</i> one more time.”</p><p>“You know what I mean,” he said urgently. “Did you feel like . . . you wanted to—”</p><p>“Bump boy parts?”</p><p>Closing his eyes for a second, he turned away, slowly licked his lips.</p><p>He hadn’t even realized he’d done it until Sam snorted a laugh so hard he was surprised they both didn’t instantly catch colds. Sitting back in his chair, Sam clutched his chest and howled at the ceiling.</p><p>He couldn’t help smiling. Said nothing and let Sam catch his breath. “All right, settle down,” he said, while Sam let out a huge, satisfied sigh, then leaned forward and began hitting keys. Sam was logging off. “Come on. Help me out here. I’m outta my depth.”</p><p>“And what depth is that, Steve,” Sam said richly. “The one where as a straight guy you see yourself in a particular light, but now Bucky Barnes has punched the same kind of hole in your face he so often tried to do with me, Natasha, Tony, Nick Fury, all of Shield, the CIA, the enforcement arm of the UN Security Council . . . none of which you cared about when it was happening, by the way . . . the face of the King of Wakanda . . . ”</p><p>“Exactly. It feels like there’s been a hole punched through everything I— thought I knew. So if you’ve been through this, could you just tell me how exactly it works.”</p><p>Sam reached forward, switched off the monitor. “First of all, there is no exactly. Second, what’s the problem? You’ve discovered you have feelings for him.” At his nod, “And you’d like to explore.” He nodded again. “So what’s the problem?”</p><p>“I can’t is the problem,” he said in a whisper. “I’ve been trying for days and it’s not happening.”</p><p>“What do you mean it’s not happening. What’s not happening.” </p><p>“You know exactly what.”</p><p>Finally Sam seemed to hear what he was saying and looked at him in surprise. “You mean you want to jerk off to the guy and you can’t?”</p><p>Brow tightening, he helplessly sent Sam a vexed look. “Don’t . . . put it so crudely. Bucky’s special.”</p><p>Sam blinked a couple of times at him. Then closed his eyes and rapidly shook his head. “I- I’m speechless.”</p><p>“Come on, Sam.”</p><p>“Steve, if it’s not happening, then maybe you’re not physically attracted to the guy.”</p><p>“Well, that’s my— that’s what I want to know,” he said instead of getting sidetracked. “Is there such a thing? That I could have feelings for him and not want to— do stuff?”</p><p>“Not in my experience. Which we won’t be discussing,” Sam added as he opened his mouth.</p><p>“So it’s me then,” he said.</p><p>“I would put my money on yes. And do so with no surprise whatsoever.”</p><p>“What’s my problem?” he asked, and Sam gave him a loaded look, so he added, “Answer that nicely.”</p><p>Sam laughed in amusement. “Listen, how would I know, dude. Maybe you love him, but no matter what, deep inside you just don’t want to do it with a guy. It’s entirely possible. Maybe you just want a little hand and mouth action under the right circumstances but that’s it.”</p><p>He was breaking into a sweat. “I can’t even get there.”</p><p>Sam look startled. “Any dude can get there.”</p><p>“Not <i>any.</i>”</p><p>Sam’s eyebrows remained raised. “Clearly.”</p><p>He glanced at Sam. He was starting to getting very worried. This wasn’t how he’d expected the conversation to go. He’d thought there was some possible technique involved.</p><p>“Do you have dreams about him? I mean erotic dreams,” Sam added drolly. “Not dreams in which the two of you take turns breaking the world. Although, maybe for you that’s—”</p><p>“No. Should I be?”</p><p>“Well, it would indicate deep-seated interest. But that tends to be more of a long term, on-going type interest thing. But it’s a place to start.”</p><p>He shook his head.  </p><p>“What kind of fantasies do you have going?” Sam asked, quietly, interestedly. “How’re you playing it out?</p><p>He frowned at Sam. “I’m not telling you that.”</p><p>“Do you . . . <i>have</i> fantasies?”</p><p>First lowering his head, he then gave Sam a patient look. Which Sam returned straight back, unfazed. “It’s a legitimate question,” Sam said blandly.</p><p>“No, it’s not.”</p><p>Sam chuckled. “Steve, I know you. It’s a legitimate question. I’m surprised you didn’t dodge answering having fantasies about him. But the fact you’re saying they’re not accomplishing anything makes me wonder whether you’re doing it wrong.”</p><p>“How does anyone do a fantasy wrong?” he couldn’t help asking.</p><p>“Oh, so you do have fantasies,” Sam said smoothly. “You’re just doing them wrong.”</p><p>“I’m pretty sure I’m doing them right.”</p><p>“<i>Clearly</i> not.”</p><p>“Okay, what would be wrong? How hard could it be?”</p><p>Sam closed his eyes, slowly shook his head. “Famous last words.”</p><p>He sighed.</p><p>“Okay, look. If you can’t get where you want to get with the guy, why not start slow instead,” Sam suggested. “Start with the basics. Hand holding, that kind of thing. Work it up with him when he wakes up.”</p><p>He made a face. “I don’t wanna be <i>that</i> girl.”</p><p>Sam seemed to miss a beat, then burst into laughter. And was soon in danger of sliding out of his chair. While he smiled to himself. </p><p>“I mean it,” he said. “Guy waits a hundred years, gets put in stasis, wakes up and I’m saying let’s take it slow. I don’t think so.”</p><p>Sighing heavily, Sam pulled himself together, wiping an eye. “Well, that’s my arsenal exhausted,” Sam said, getting up. “I gotta go. Prep takes me a little longer than you super-powered types. And yes, Natasha is internally super-powered. Oh, and don’t check me out as I leave. It won’t solve your problem.”</p><p>“Clearly.”</p><p>Sam laughed softly to himself as he reached the door. “It’s not rocket science, Steve.”</p><p>Sam was almost across the threshold before he thought to ask, “Then what is it?”</p><p>Sam smiled, stepping through. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”</p><p>Typical. Everyone took pleasure in ragging on the Winter Soldier, yet even when trying to punch a hole through him, or kneeing him down an elevator shaft for that matter, he felt that Bucky had still shown him more love than what he was feeling from anyone right now.</p><p>—</p><p>“Steve.” It was Natasha over his intercom, no doubt with the mission call.</p><p>“Go.”</p><p>“Got em.”</p><p>Natasha had returned a hit on the ID-stripped uniforms from the surveillance footage.</p><p>Within the hour, SHIELD had located a base in an abandoned factory in the countryside of the French-Belgian, not too distant from France’s World War Two  fortifications known as the Maginot Line, in fact. And while their pilot swept down the Quinjet and they dropped in on the mercenaries having their evening meal, he couldn’t help thinking that Buck would get a kick out hearing about another War location throwing up a surprise.</p><p>No weapons parts were present at the base, but no question they’d found a major supply link in the operation.</p><p>Maria Hill came out onto the flight deck to congratulate them this time as they offloaded their bounty, her impassive gaze barely reaching the commandos as security took them away.</p><p>Behind her, at the entrance to flight operations, stood Richard Jones and his deputy director friend. Both were very clearly supervising the detention. Their Quinjet, incidentally, was parked precisely where they had landed it a couple days ago. They hadn’t left the Helicarrier since arriving.</p><p>Without taking his eyes off Richard Jones, he asked Maria the same single question he always asked her whenever he ran into her. Topic permitting. As now.</p><p>“Have those scientists said why they thought an alien invasion was on its way?”</p><p>And as always she gave him a variation on her usual answer. “Ever since Thor and Loki’s fight, everyone always assumes an alien invasion is on its way.”</p><p>“But Shield especially.”</p><p>“It’s our job, Captain.”</p><p>She spoke just as Natasha strolled up. Sam had followed security into flight ops behind their prisoners, walking right past the two men he didn’t know. He broke his gaze from there long enough to flick a glance at Maria. Whom after helping him take down SHIELD at the Triskelion, didn’t nonetheless seem to think of him as some kind of brother-in-arms. He really didn’t understand spy-types.</p><p>Stopped next to him, Natasha was eyeing Maria. Same as him, he was sure Natasha thought.</p><p>Following the direction of his gaze however, which had since left her, Maria slightly turned, saw what he was looking at and was silent. Then Natasha looked over there as well.</p><p>All three of them were silent, staring at the same operative.</p><p>“And what’s <i>his</i> job,” Natasha asked.</p><p>Maria turned back to them, maintaining eye contact. “Whose?”</p><p>“That guy,” Natasha said, who didn’t enjoy playing games with her own side. “Agent Richard Jones. The one hanging around that deputy director and supervising the weapons, and now the mercs, that we’re bringing in. He’s not top-level clearance. Least I don’t think he is.”</p><p>“He has a job, no different than any other Shield personnel.”</p><p>“Right, and I’m asking what it is.”</p><p>“Why are you so interested?”</p><p>Natasha shrugged a shoulder. “Shows up on a Quinjet no one’s ever seen, takes charge of a girl’s hard work. Who wouldn’t want to know.”</p><p>Maria gave Natasha the barest of smiles. “We’re all on the same side, Natasha.”</p><p>Natasha laughed. “Now where have I heard that before.” She tilted her head at Maria. “Can we at least interrogate our own prisoners?”</p><p>“Ah, no. We have someone for that. He can make them talk much more easily.”</p><p>“He?”</p><p>Maria turned her even stare at him. “Everyone has their job, Captain,” she said again. “I know it’s been a rough ride with Shield, but we really are all on the same side. Always have been.”</p><p>“We better be,” Natasha said softly. Then turned to him. “Catch you later, Steve.”</p><p>“Great work by your team, Captain,” Maria said, walking away.</p><p>He looked over at flight ops where Natasha was headed, but the two men were long gone.</p><p>—</p><p>That evening he took a luxurious shower. He’d looked it up on the internet and that was the effect he was going for. Turned off his intercom, muted alerts from the door to his quarters. For a couple of hours it was going to be just him and Bucky, warm water, and liquid soap. Maybe he <i>had</i> been doing it wrong all along.</p><p>Getting under the warm water, he stood still and closed his eyes, letting its incessant flow over his skin lead the way.</p><p>After a minute he applied some liquid soap, then placing his forearm against the shower wall, he rested his forehead, let out a breath, and thought of his best friend.</p><p>He started with what he knew — sick at eighteen, influenza that came and went for everyone else, refusing to leave his body. Flat on his back, his chest and throat gripped in a deathly cold. His ma gone, Doc Hollister in and out. Bucky staying with him. It had been five feverish days. But on the sixth, fever broken, he had opened his eyes and there was Bucky in a chair by his bed, fast asleep. He’d had just enough strength to toss the other pillow at Bucky’s face. Bucky woke up, picking up the pillow and getting into bed with him. Then Bucky had put his arm around him and pushed his forehead to his temple. They had fallen asleep, and the next morning he’d been able to get back on his feet.</p><p>But now, instead, he played out a different scenario. Turning to Bucky, feeling his breath on his face, Bucky pulling him closer. Then nothing happened. He could only see Bucky talking to him. He couldn’t even see himself kissing Bucky’s face as he’d managed on the Quinjet. They were just talking about meditation and other things. </p><p>Then camped at the foot of the Austrian Alps on a frigid winter’s night in 1944, watching sporadic tracers in the night sky trying to bring down aircraft while they waited on a Hydra convey coming through in the morning. It had been so cold that everyone in the unit had begged Bucky for turns to have Cap spoon them. Much to his surprise, he’d been pouring heat like a radiator. Just five minutes against his body with his arms wrapped around them, per Army manual instructions, was enough to keep them warm for hours. When it was Bucky’s turn last he got under the blankets and took his shirt off. No one else had cared for that, though it wouldn’t have bothered him at all. Bucky had slept like a baby. It had been the most undressed and intimate he had been with him in adulthood. </p><p>Now he imagined stroking Bucky awake, Bucky turning to him. Holding onto the feel of Bucky’s body, he imagined what Bucky would say. How they would talk to each other under such circumstances. What he would say back. <i>”Steve, I’m glad you’re here. We should never have been apart.”</i> And he would whisper back . . . <i>I’m glad I’m here too, Bucky,</i> and almost instantly felt himself flagging. </p><p>Maybe it wasn’t about talk. Warm water pouring over him, plastering his hair to his face, he worked on the sensations, the movement, how it would feel getting gripped.</p><p>Mouth open, he panted as sensation flooded him, blocking out everything else.</p><p>A short while later, he let out a final gasp, remained as he was. No, he sure couldn’t credit a breakthrough for that. Natasha, maybe.</p><p>He would never have believed it possible to reach climax and be left completely unsatisfied.</p><p>What the hell was this? How could he not do this?</p><p>
  <i>So what about Wakanda . . .</i>
</p><p>The thought reached him as though from somewhere else.</p><p>And had him taking a breath as the water washed over him. </p><p>
  <i>Five days alone with him and you would have done anything.</i>
</p><p>He hated thinking about Wakanda. It hurt too much. But those memories he had so aggressively frozen had thawed since he’d read Bucky’s letters. Only waiting for a revisit any time. He still couldn’t. But now some of it was nudging.</p><p>That morning in Shuri’s lab, the culmination of five of the most bittersweet days of his life. The morning when he would have done it. Kissed Bucky, had Bucky turned his head and responded the way he had so desperately wanted. It had been among the most clear-eyed moments of his life, second only to having to let Bucky go on Boston Harbor a century ago. Had Bucky been well enough to fully know what was happening, enough to kiss him — and he meant <i>kissed</i> him, tongue and everything — he didn’t need to be told how he would have responded. Before the entire lab, on a live feed to the United Nations even. He would have done his earthly best to return Bucky a kiss that would be the very first thing Bucky would wake up asking for.</p><p>But even as he thought it he knew what he was doing in his memory. Same thing he had just done. Substituting the feel of a woman’s mouth for how he presumed Bucky’s would feel.</p><p>He was going crazy. He didn’t understand what physical attraction was if it wasn’t what he felt for Bucky. He felt smothered under a blanket he couldn’t shake off. What Sam had said about maybe him not actually being physically attracted to Bucky was nonsense. Buck was a knockout. Had Bucky been a girl, he would have lost his mind at 13. It would have been him prowling the neighborhood in heat searching for Bucky. So what was the difference here?</p><p>He felt as though Bucky was standing outside his window, rattling the frame, calling for him to get up and let him in.</p><p>He wanted to push up the window and drag him in and get physical with him like he needed a painkiller.</p><p>He was going to go crazy unless he could.</p><p>He switched off the shower. Reached for a towel. And was soon out of his quarters.</p><p>—</p><p>Thor proclaimed all kinds of things about humans and existence in the universe that never failed to leave him more confused than when the conversation began.</p><p>And Thor could really get out there with the explanations. <i>Metaphysics,</i> it was called, because physics wasn’t strange enough. Even with an enhanced capacity for processing information, the things Thor would talk about — mind, brain, physical body, head and heart stuff, realms and that Tree of theirs — were so out there that half the time he wondered whether Thor wasn’t just yanking their chains.</p><p>Given the slightest encouragement at get-togethers — or no encouragement at all, really — Thor would get misty-eyed talking about the babyhood of the planet Earth and how humans used to be far more adventurous and interesting. How while ancient Scandinavians, who were their first human contact, had considered them gods, that was certainly not the case. In fact, though Asgard didn’t know for sure, records not having been properly maintained by his race — his rather inebriation-prone race, if you asked him, so no surprises that someone had lost records — it was accepted that humans either came from Asgard or both “realms” shared a common ancestry.</p><p>“An ancestry whose chronicles, though lost to us, nonetheless reside in the Realms held together by what you so carelessly call magic. There Huginn and Muninn retain. Whether names are chosen to be forgotten, or in fact deeply held.”</p><p>Talk about things for a kid from ancient Brooklyn to retain.</p><p>“Huh,” Rhodey had said. “But if your race is immortal, how do you have ancestors?”</p><p>“We are not immortal,” Thor had replied, evenly. “Both my parents are dead.”</p><p>That had been pretty awkward for Rhodey.</p><p>What he had retained, besides the understanding that both races could certainly get smashed, was that Thor had been telling him something important.</p><p>That the universe was made up of “realms” and their neighborhood of it, nine in total, was held together by a Tree. Which he had assumed was a metaphor for connection, except Thor said it did actually exist in a physical place. Whose name he was forgetting. And that the Tree connected the physical to the metaphysical. There’d also then been something in there about actually being able to enter the place where the Tree was for deep contemplation of the big stuff.</p><p>After that, he’d then discovered that Huginn and Muninn actually meant thought and memory in Dutch. Or was it Norwegian. Or maybe it was Swedish. </p><p>Either way, he’d finally understood what Thor had been getting at — that there seemed to be a place in existence to find answers. And Thor meant big question answers.</p><p>Although, he still couldn’t say he quite understood. Because subsequently, there’d been a time when he’d been at a loss on how to move on from a terrible sense of displacement from the War. But when he’d asked Thor whether it might be easier to mourn from there, which seemed logical to him, Thor had told him no way.</p><p>Well, he was more hopeful this time.</p><p>Which was how he came to be sitting in secure comms at just after midnight.</p><p>Set up in a grid of spacious, sound-proofed cubicles, secure comms was where, when not on the Quinjet or in his quarters, he sent Bucky updates on his day.</p><p>Tonight he found a cubicle, sat on the desk. Pulling on a headset, he reached for the panel behind and signaled Asgard. </p><p>Already having figured out how he would phrase himself, hopefully for a better result than last time, he laced his hands between his knees and waited.</p><p>“Steve Rogers,” Thor said in answering.</p><p>“Hiya, Thor. How are ya?”</p><p>“Uh . . . I’m well. And yourself?”</p><p>“I’m okay. You got a minute?”</p><p>There was a pause. It was a little background-noisy where Thor was, the noise lessening as Thor apparently moved somewhere more quiet.</p><p>“You may proceed.”</p><p>Being <i>almost</i> immortal, Rhodey had then whispered to him while someone had pulled away Thor’s attention, Thor’s people were more expansive in thought and tended to lack a sense of immediacy to human dilemmas. Rhodey’s advice on asking for Thor’s help was to always make things sound as close as possible to world-ending or existential crisis for better results.</p><p>So he explained his problem to Thor. Not about failing to make time with Bucky in his head, of course. More that he was having a . . . metaphysical problem of profoundly missing Bucky. </p><p>“I— think of him constantly— of his life— his existence,” he amended, trying to sound vague, and so maybe profound. “And . . . especially in the past couple of months . . . although I’m not— entirely sure why . . . ” which was true, though he had never really thought about it that way. “But recently, I’ve— uncovered something, and I . . . think it means something, which I can’t seem to resolve. And . . . ” He shook his head, giving up. “I miss him,” he said simply.</p><p>But he could practically feel Thor nodding.</p><p>“He was a brother to you,” Thor declared, in his epic tones. “You fought wars together and so you miss the heat of his presence against your heart. His arms around you, holding you close when you suffer a moment of weakness. The strength of his body shoring up your own, pushing to ever greater heights of joy and satisfaction, even when not in battle against your enemies. He holds you tight, and hard. As brothers do.”</p><p>“Ye . . . ss. So— that’s— that’s what I need, actually. All of that back. I can’t seem to—” </p><p>And again he stopped. Because hurt in him spiked. Suddenly, he got it. Why it was all so much more painful than whether he could finish a sex fantasy. “I have memories of our shared past,” he heard himself saying. “But I feel that now, as men . . . I can’t find him. Or myself.”</p><p>There it was. The core of his hurt. Why it felt like in failing, he was betraying Bucky.</p><p>Thor was silent. No more than him.</p><p>“Does . . . that make sense?” he asked with a lot of difficulty.</p><p>“It makes perfect sense. You have known each other all your lives but — lost each other at a time when most people are becoming who they truly are. Then you once more found each other, but even as you found yourself, he had lost himself. Now you must both meet at a center.”</p><p>He stared blankly at the floor. “How do you know that about me and Bucky?” he asked. He wasn’t sure <i>he</i> knew that about him and Bucky. </p><p>“Rhodey explained it to me the night of the party at Stark Tower, the night you felt Mjölnir was yours to lift,” Thor added in an undertone, chuckling very softly. “You were still searching for Bucky although both you and Sam wished it not to be known. Rhodey explained to me why it seemed so important that you locate a known assassin and save him from the world.”</p><p><i>Rhodey</i> knew that about him and Bucky?</p><p>When the silence began stretching, he asked, “So do- do you happen to know anything about such a center?”</p><p>“I believe that is why you have called.”</p><p>“Right. Hope this plays out better than the last time, though,” he said hopefully.</p><p>“It depends on what you seek.”</p><p>Nodding, he took a breath. Here went his pitch. “There’s a lot going on in my mind and it’s interfering with what’s in my heart. That is, I know what’s in my heart . . . I just can’t get to it.”</p><p>“Mm hmm,” Thor murmured. “The human mind is indeed very jumbled.”</p><p>“Ironic,” he couldn’t help saying, “seeing as I’m supposed to be the living sample of heart, mind and body working seamlessly together. And normally that’s the case. But for this basic thing, I can’t seem to manage.”</p><p>“I understand,” Thor said definitively, sounding like he did. “What you need is to bypass the limitations of your own mind. What you require is to enter the Connected Realm.”</p><p>“That’s the name,” he said. “Where the Tree of—”</p><p>“Yes,” Thor said, encouragingly. “Where the Tree of Life exists. The places of contemplation connected by Yggdrasil. You must enter this realm in which mind and body join. For you may not discard the mind, believing it to be the culprit. The mind is what holds everything together. That realm is accessed through the meditative state. Learn to access it and you will achieve whatever you seek.”</p><p>“That’s great, Thor,” he said. “But you know, I think my language translator broke for a whole chunk there. Right around ig-druh- something. So say again, but this time in English.”</p><p>Thor chuckled. Even though to him Thor sounded a little . . . forced. Then Thor began again, slowly. Explaining that the ig-druh thing was the Tree of Life: connected to everything, disconnected from what didn’t matter. While the Tree connected their neighborhood of nine realms, the Connected Realm sat at its center. Kind of like its heart.</p><p>“When you arrive you will know. You will be physically there, kind of, though not really, as you will still be wherever you are presently.”</p><p>“So in my quarters still.”</p><p>“Yes. But you will also be in the Realm.”</p><p>Shaking his head, he just pushed on. “So what happens there? I mediate?”</p><p>“No, meditation gets you there. Once you are there you will find whatever you seek.”</p><p>“Right. So how exactly do I do the seeking, to resolve my problem, if not meditation.”</p><p>“Well, you may then simply ask him.”</p><p>“Ask who?”</p><p>“Bucky. Is that not from whom you seek answers?”</p><p>He blinked at the floor, no idea what the conversation had suddenly turned into. “Sorry, I’m not understanding. Say again.”</p><p>“When you reach the Realm, you may then speak with him. And together perhaps you may find the path of your shared future. Which is what I believe you are seeking?”</p><p>“You’re saying . . . I’ll find Bucky there.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>He was silent. “I’ll see Bucky there,” he repeated, clarifying.</p><p>“Of course. If that is what you wish.”</p><p>He just sat there, struggling with Thor’s logic. </p><p>“Will it <i>be</i> Bucky? Or— a kind of . . . dream? Because Buck’s in stasis right now in Wakanda, receiving treatment. And you just said it’s all physical there.”</p><p>“Oh,” Thor said softly. “I did not know. I’m very sorry to hear that, Steve. I wish you both well. But yes, it will be him.”</p><p>He had stopped breathing a while ago. That couldn’t be right.</p><p>Thor said, “As long as he is alive, he can be found there as well.”</p><p>He almost couldn’t ask again. “<i>Physically?</i>”</p><p>“Yes. As it is a physical place.”</p><p>“Is- is this why you said I couldn’t mourn there?”</p><p>“That is correct. For there are no dead in the Realms. Their souls are elsewhere.”</p><p>“But— how will Bucky know to be there? Even if he were awake, I’d still need to call and tell him to meet me there, right?”</p><p>“There is no need.”</p><p>He was shaking his head, saying before he could help himself, “Thor, this is hard to believe.”</p><p>“I don’t doubt that for a human it is.”</p><p>No, Thor had to be talking about something else and he was just misunderstanding.</p><p>But it didn’t matter. He’d happily take Bucky in a dream any day. Even that would be years ahead of his current tally of failures.</p><p>“How do I get there? I don’t know anything about meditation.”</p><p>“Oh, that’s merely what it’s called on Midgard. On Earth. It’s all just a recitation of access codes. Prayers, you call them. Which I will now give you.”</p><p>His eyebrows went up. <i>What the heck . . . ?</i></p><p>“Take this down,” Thor said, and he turned and grabbed the nearest pad and told Thor he was ready, then tapped in a string of words phonetically. Then swept a glance over the pad, memorized the sequence and put it aside.</p><p>“Just lie down,” Thor said, “in silence. And recite the code in your head. Not aloud, as audio will disrupt the electrical signals the code triggers inside the human brain.” Thor chuckled once more, this time to himself. “Your brains are so amusing. But humans do require a strong mind to keep your brain focused during the process. But you have a strong mind. And that should do it.”</p><p>“What’s it like there?” he said breathlessly. His very human brain was making a movie, starring him and a dream Bucky Barnes. Oh, boy.</p><p>“Oh,” Thor said thoughtfully, casually. “Vast. Colorful. Vibrant. Very sensual—”</p><p>“Sensual?”</p><p>“Oh yes.”</p><p>“Are there . . . things in it?”</p><p>“Yes. Trees, grass, plains, waters . . . and of course, Yggdrasil itself, which is an unforgettable sight. The Connected Realm holds tremendous power, Steve. Therefore treat it with care. Remember that not just memory exists there, but thought itself. And thought can be unlocked, laid bare . . . made physical. It is a powerful force to unleash.”</p><p>While his heart kicked into harder beats — the conversation was full of the wild strangeness he remembered whenever Thor spoke on it — but if he was really about to meet up with Bucky . . . </p><p>The background noise level where Thor increased. If his hearing was picking it up so distinctly over the connection, then Thor had to be making a serious effort to ignore it. To Thor it had to sound like a building made of steel and glass was collapsing in his ears. </p><p>When he heard Thor’s very subtle sigh, he knew he hadn’t imagined the forced leisurely tones.</p><p>There was a sudden clamor at Thor’s end, the noise momentarily increasing. Then came snatches of phrases from somewhere in what he presumed was Asgardian and which the language translator didn’t seem able to process. He waited while Thor gruffly answered the person talking.</p><p>“Sorry about that,” Thor said, coming back on the connection.</p><p>“Feels like I caught you at a bad time. Sounds really busy where you are.”</p><p>“Yes, we’re all quite busy at the moment.”</p><p>“Yeah? How’s Loki? How’re things at home? Sorry, I didn’t even ask.”</p><p>Thor paused. “Uh, a little tense. Our sister’s around.”</p><p>It was his turn to pause, wondering whether he’d misheard. “<i>Sister?</i>”</p><p>Now it sounded like the building was trying to reverse itself back into form, a sound so jarring adrenaline flooded him. Then came more rushed speech. Thor hit the mute button. After a moment, the Asgardian returned.</p><p>“Listen, I’ll let you go,” he quickly said.</p><p>“Yes, that would be apt. Take care, Steve Rogers. Whatever you are seeking, I have no doubt that you will find.”</p><p>—</p><p>It didn’t work.</p><p>Well, it did work. He did get himself to a vast, strange land.</p><p>But Bucky wasn’t there. He was completely alone. </p><p>Thor had a lot of faith in him, for some reason. </p><p>The place he found himself was the largest place he had ever seen. Like an entire world to be seen in just one glance — short golden grass going all the way to the horizon, giant shafts of golden sunlight blazing through a canopy of white clouds, hitting the earth like enormous flashlights. Valleys and mountains rising in a circle around the perimeter of the world. And in one direction, almost too distant to see, a tree whose upper section was lost in the white clouds above, and whose lower half was apparently sunk into the ground. Yggdrasil, he presumed.</p><p>An unforgettable sight? Trust a semi-immortal being to understate the feeling. It was breathtaking in the literal sense. The entire place was.</p><p>It was like standing over a perfect summer day. It was inside as well as all around. A warm, soft breeze was blowing, shifting through the grass like a hand running over the plain. He had felt himself arrive by stepping forward onto an elevated rock outcrop covered in what looked like golden moss. Behind him was a rock face, before him the empty, golden vista.</p><p>He stood on the outcropping and focusing his sight, looked carefully toward the far mountains.  </p><p>There appeared to be on them the most colorful, vibrant plants he had ever seen. Even from his distance they looked . . . florescent. Glowing even against the sunlight. The mountains there formed a valley, in which sat an enormous — meadow of colorful flowers. Except it couldn’t be a meadow, or flowers, because it was . . . flowing. Like water. Like a lake made of the rainbow.</p><p>It was only one among all the strange sights of the Realm. The Tree was — well, it was literally too big for the world and seemed to extend into several more. </p><p>But even as he took in the wonders, looking around him, he was looking for Bucky.</p><p>And even long before he gave up, he knew Bucky wasn’t there. </p><p>He knew it because there in that strange plane of existence, he felt his absence a thousand times more acutely that in real life.</p><p>If he could have ever broken down and cried, it would have been then. But of course nothing happened in that regard either.</p><p>Yet he stayed in that weird place a while. Because even the feel of Bucky’s absence was more real than anything he had managed in waking life. </p><p>Finding a comfortable spot, he sat with his back against the rock face and closed his eyes, the warm breeze soothing him. Thor hadn’t been wrong in any respect. It was vast, colorful, and deeply sensual.</p><p>And Bucky was here. It took some waiting, some emptying his mind, but he could feel it, even if he didn’t understand it — the heat of his presence against his heart. He could feel it.</p><p>Somehow, he just wasn’t deserving of seeing him.</p><p>Buck had always been the one to solve all their problems. But now that it was his turn, he was failing Bucky. Finally no longer completely clueless, enough to understand that they were actually in love with other, which was why it always felt so good to be in each other’s presence, now though he was supposed to explain to Bucky that there was a caveat.</p><p>Not since childhood had he felt as inadequate.</p><p>The problem, as he supposed Bucky could have told him all their lives, was him.</p><p>When he opened his eyes again he was seated upright in his bed. And staring out his bay windows at the silver moonlight on the clouds, the deep blue of the night sky all around. He seemed still to be returning from where he had been, as aside from an odd prickling sensation in his brain, as if an electrical charge was dissipating, in the far mid-distance of the night, the Tree of Life punctured the whitish clouds, infinitesimally rotating with the motion of the Helicarrier circling the planet. 

In the waking world it was even more heart-stopping a sight to see. While in the Realm it had shone with browns and greens like a glowing autumn day, at the moment its bark a dark velvet grey and the leaves that showed beneath the upper cloud atmosphere were silver.</p><p>He stared at it, the bed and quarters leaving him as though he was floating in space. He watched as the sight slowly faded like smoke. And when he blinked, it was gone.</p><p>Replaced by the reflection of the bay windows, the feel beneath him of the Stark Industries memory-foam mattress.</p><p>Dropping his head, he pushed a hand through his hair. Then, checking the time, slowly pushed the covers off him and got out of bed. Shortly, he exited his quarters.</p><p>—</p><p>Every few days or so, he strolled to the cargo bay holding their confiscated Chitauri weapons. </p><p>The weapons were being covered by triple security, and whenever he went in he did a quick visual sweep and counted that none of the cases had disappeared. Noted from each container’s readout that the count inside was consistent. Call him paranoid, but this felt familiar. And like last time, he didn’t believe that SHIELD’s stockpiling of the weapons was altruistic. In fact he believed, strongly, that Nick Fury was aware of something either happening or about to happen on a worldwide scale which needed the use of alien technology. And asked, Nick, much like Maria, had continually obfuscated.</p><p>So every few days he walked into cargo hold unannounced to see what was transpiring. So far it was always just techies checking field integrities and all that on the Stark Industries crating, or SHIELD deputy directors dropping in for inspection. Though sometimes it was unidentified personnel. Heads together, discussing who knew what.</p><p>Tonight was no different. Except for who the personnel happened to be.</p><p>As immersed as he’d been with his own problems, he’d let completely let slip from his mind his concerns about ex-SHIELD operative Richard Jones.</p><p>But that was precisely who, along with his deputy director pal, he was stopped right then in cargo bay staring at.</p><p>The cargo bay was mid-sized. Both men were being briefed by tech personnel who flanked them. On his entry, both lifted their gazes from the pads, and as if expecting him, locked eyes on him.</p><p>He stood where he was, staring back at them</p><p>No one in the room moved or said a word.</p><p>Faltering, the techies halted their briefing and looked between the three of them. Then the one on the deputy director’s side muttered something and she and her fellow techie hurriedly left. Outside, a security sentry peered in momentarily, before straightening back to his post as the doors slid closed.</p><p>Inside the cargo bay, all three of them remained as they were.</p><p>“Evening, Captain,” the deputy director said casually into the heavy silence.</p><p>While Richard Jones said nothing at all.</p><p>Outside of their one, bizarre encounter, the distance was as close as he had ever come to the operative.</p><p>Richard Jones was tall, almost as tall as Vision, slim-built, and red-haired. He had pale cream-colored skin and vivid walnut brown eyes. </p><p>Whenever he looked at the operative he felt . . . disoriented. As though looking at an apparition. At something that wasn’t there. And because of the way Richard Jones had first made himself known to him, whenever in his presence he continually struggled with the sensation that they did know each other and that he was merely suffering from a memory wipe.</p><p>It was infuriating. Because he didn’t know this man. But he did know when he’d been marked as a target.</p><p>“Who are you,” he said. “Both of you.”</p><p>The deputy director feigned a baffled, amused smile. “Pretty sure we’ve met in briefings, Cap.” And then, softly, “And you can’t say you don’t know Rick.”</p><p>He moved his eyes to Richard Jones.</p><p>In every one of their previous encounters bar none, this strange person would smirk inexplicably on seeing him. As if finding him the punchline of some unknown joke. </p><p>This time, there was no smirk.</p><p>Tonight Richard Jones stared intensely, unblinkingly at him. Standing so still it was like looking at a picture of a person instead of at a person. Like a predator unable to move, mesmerized, watching his prey. Eyes locked on him. As though he could read his very thoughts. As though . . . </p><p>As he watched, Richard Jones . . . began to blush.</p><p>He was seeing it, not imagining it.</p><p>The operative’s complexion bloomed with color until it was nearly the same shade as his hair. His pupils dilating so intensely it seemed they pushed out the color of his eyes themselves, until the entire cargo bay seemed tinted a glowing, reddish-brown.</p><p>He wasn’t imagining that either.</p><p>The operative stood very slightly leaned forward, <i>staring</i> at him with slowly moving eyes, as though a literal feast sat inside his head. Behind his eyes. Somewhere around his heart.</p><p>Gently, the deputy nudged Rick, who turned a slow, aggressive look at his companion. Seeming surprised to be disturbed. Without a word or even a look at his friend, the director started for the exit and Richard Jones simply followed him out.</p><p>He watched them leave, waiting for the inevitable last look over his shoulder. And Richard Jones obliged. But still there was no smirk. Nothing except the look of a frustrated predator.</p><p>Long after the bay doors had slid closed, he still stood there, not quite believing what had just taken place.</p><p>—</p><p>“Nothing,” Natasha said the following morning. “I got nothing.”</p><p>They were on the Quinjet, returning from recon and delaying landing on the Helicarrier, their pilot circling the inconsequential coordinates he’d given her, while having to ignore her alternating awed and worried side-eyeing. His reputation at SHIELD was shot, no question. </p><p>Delaying while waiting for Natasha’s tracer inside SHIELD’s systems to return a hit on Richard Jones. He’d asked her to break in and find out just who that man was and what exactly was going on.</p><p>Now the three of them were huddled around a cargo bay terminal glowing dim text at them, which Natasha assured them meant very little.</p><p>“These are just classified personal records,” she explained quietly. “Which match his current affiliation with Shield as a consultant of sorts. This is as far as I go before Shield detects my tracer. On the Helicarrier I could go deeper, but I’ve got the network here modified and there it would be even easier for Shield to detect an intrusion.” She sighed, hiding real frustration. “Really thought my days of hacking my own side were over.”</p><p>“Who is this guy again?” Sam asked.</p><p>“Well, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it, Sam. Although frankly I’m more interested in what his mission is. And what he wants with that cargo.”</p><p>“And with you.”</p><p>Sam looked, but he didn’t. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.</p><p>At the corner of his vision, he saw Natasha shrug. “Baseline precaution? Steve <i>is</i> a lightning rod.”</p><p>Which was how he knew he’d be having an intimate conversation with Natasha about a few things before this was all over. He was busy dodging her queries when he knew full well that she knew, picked up on, or deduced orders of magnitude above anything she ever told anyone. And that maybe he ought to be getting himself ready even then.</p><p>But Sam swallowed her diversion. Sighed, and said, “So one more to go on the radar.”</p><p>“That’s right,” Natasha said, then glancing out the port window, said in a happy voice, “Over and out, boys. We’re docking.”</p><p>— </p><p>Natasha’s happy voice was because it was someone’s birthday onboard and she never missed a chance at a dance party. And she wanted him out of his quarters and socializing.</p><p>A request to which he complied, since it was easier than arguing with either of them. So attend he did. And spent the entire time—</p><p>“Preoccupied.”</p><p>“Immersed,” Natasha insisted.</p><p>“Okay,” Sam said. “Explain to me the difference.”</p><p>They were all three of them sitting around eating cake. Plates of the stuff. Red velvet, it was. Among the many continually fascinating aspects of waking up in the future — all the foods from the ethnicities of their childhood now wrapped into something called <i>fusion cuisine,</i> now offering nearly endless food options. Red velvet in their day was what the Blacks in Harlem ate at their celebrations, cake colored in remembrance of the blood of their enslaved ancestors. Now it was just party cake.</p><p>“You can be preoccupied by something — you know, you’re thinking about it — yet do so from a distance, whether emotional or physical. Immersion is being thrown into a pool of water.” Sam was silent. “Do you see—”</p><p>“I see the difference,” Sam said, nodding. Paused, and said, “In which case I win.”</p><p>“Explain <i>that</i> to me,” Natasha cried.</p><p>“Right now Steve is preoccupied,” Sam said. “When Steve gets . . . immersed,” and here Sam let out a loose laugh, “and let’s just go ahead and call it what it is. When Steve gets <i>wet</i>—”</p><p>“Ooh, Sam,” he said softly, “let’s not.”</p><p>Sam was still laughing. “When <i>that</i> happens, we won’t be sitting at a birthday party having this, or any other conversation with Steve.”</p><p>“Why?” Natasha asked, round-eyed and blinking interested at Sam. Around a mouthful of cake, which was both funny and pretty. “What’ll happen?”</p><p>“Immersion,” Sam said sagely, nodding repeatedly. “Immersion is what’ll happen. That immersion that happens to every thirteen year old boy, riiiight around when he discovers—”</p><p>“Hi there, Sam,” he said cheerfully. “This is a public gathering.”</p><p>Natasha leaned over to Sam and covering her mouth, began whispering. Causing Sam to scream in silent laughter, having to set his plate down and turn away, while Natasha smugly returned to forking cake into her mouth.</p><p>“Is that right?” he said.</p><p>“Oh yeah,” she said.</p><p>He just shook his head. Cake was finished, so he piled on some more samosas. The party was being held in a nonsecure comms rom in the belly of the Helicarrier, near the engines so dance music could go full blast. Which is was. Unlike secure comms, here the rooms were just open spaces lined with stations and chairs, which were right then pushed to the walls to create a makeshift dance floor. Where personnel were going at it in pairs and even threesomes while whispering and pointing in their direction. He wasn’t even sure whose birthday it was.</p><p>“You ever danced?” Natasha had asked when they’d first arrived. “Or seen people dance? I don’t mean like the foxtrot, or a waltz. I mean like hot sexy dance.”</p><p>Somehow he’d contained his smirk. Now watching from their food and drinks crowded station, the lights were dimmed with the brightness on the terminal screens turned up for a kind of party lighting effect, he watched then turn up the heat. As best they could anyway. At a point he’d been startled to sit back and not find Bucky’s arm behind him. But he knew if the said the words “hot jazz” and “bomba” to Natasha, she’d eject him from the nearest cargo bay without hesitation.</p><p>“What’re in Bucky Barnes’s letters,” Natasha asked.</p><p>“Urrp,” Sam said.</p><p>“Bucky’s letters are in the Smithsonian Archives,” he pointed out. “Nothing stops you from reading them yourself.”</p><p>“But I’d have no context,” she complained.</p><p>“What you’d need is <i>subtext,</i>” Sam said.</p><p>Natasha frowned. “What, like annotation?”</p><p>Sam resumed his ongoing, sloshed laughter.</p><p>Whereas he himself was smiling. And when he looked from under his lashes at her, she was looking at him. Winked at him. He just snorted and shook his head. So the entire evening, she was playing with him. If not the entire week. As with not telling Sam her true thoughts on Richard Jones’s weird interest in him, she knew more about his condition with Bucky than she was caring to divulge. She was biding her time.</p><p>“You’re gonna come asking,” she said softly, smiling.</p><p>Playing hard to get, he said, “Thought you said you were gonna find out.”</p><p>“I still got time.”</p><p>He scoffed, shook his head.</p><p>“Hi- hi, guys,” someone was suddenly breathlessly saying in their midst. “Does anyone want more cake?”</p><p>All three of them looked up at the staffer who’d come over, tray of red velvet cake aloft. Sam and Natasha swept the tray clean, thanking the rather surprised guy. While he himself was very suddenly having to avert his gaze, taken over by unexpected self-consciousness. </p><p>The staffer was glancing repeatedly at him, flushed and with a rapidly tripping pulse going at the base of his throat. Which he could see like it was magnified in his vision. The guy cast him look after look, while it seemed it was taking forever for cake to be replenished.</p><p>The same look he’d found himself first becoming acutely aware of during his USO tour, from dames who had supposedly lost their way to bathrooms or dressing rooms and just so happened to be passing by his own. After a lifetime of sticking his finger out to point them in whatever direction Bucky lay, and in spite of supposedly having prepared for just such moments his whole life, of course he’d spent the first few days pointing them in the right direction. Until the day one of the dames hadn’t bothered with words. That time he’d heard what all the others had been trying to say.</p><p>Same here now. As the staffer — maybe he was the birthday boy actually — swept him a last look before retreating with the empty tray.</p><p>And he sent a discreet look at him. <i>Wow,</i> there it was.</p><p>The look he had never exchanged with Bucky Barnes.</p><p>As the birthday boy moved through the party, he kept his gaze covertly on him. Wondering whether maybe that was really the missing piece his stubborn mind needed — actual physical proof of reciprocal interest. Maybe it mattered in getting a rise . . . </p><p>A nudge at his knee interrupted him and he glanced over, Natasha opposite him was talking to someone, to find Sam’s eyes on him. Sam slowly, minutely shook his head, mouthed, “Not appropriate.”</p><p>He drew his brow. “He started it,” he mouthed back. Sam shut his eyes and shook his head, ate newly delivered cake.</p><p>He did stay and socialized a little, listening and nodding as called for as crew came over, stammered all kinds of historical — Word War two, Great Depression, Pre-War Era New York — stuff at him. </p><p>Apparently neither the internet nor videos were as satisfying as speaking with a talking fossil.</p><p>But all he could think of was Bucky. Something had changed inside him, and it had altered his world entirely. But if he couldn’t get this right . . . </p><p>He needed to figure out his life.</p><p>Late into the party, Sam soused and Natasha dancing, he found his way out of there.</p><p>—</p><p>Six levels up, on their deck, at his door and about to enter his quarters, he turned his head and looked left, straight down the corridor toward the intersection one.</p><p>Something had moved.</p><p>It was well after midnight, and on their deck, which was upper on the Helicarrier where VIPs — diplomats and dignitaries — were housed while being transported, because psychologically it was comforting to know the A-team was with them, security was tight. Right then there were no diplomats or dignitaries being transported on the Helicarrier. The entire deck was clear but for him, Sam and Natasha. </p><p>Leaving his door, he took a stroll.</p><p>At the intersection of their steel corridor with the next one, he stood and looked both ways. The hallways were dim, dark, silent.</p><p>From there he stood and stared all the way down to the end of their corridor. He stood for a long time, waiting.</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>He listened, but all he heard were the solar engines — constantly humming, but near silent. Even shadows didn’t seem to exist.</p><p>But what he’d seen hadn’t been a shadow. It had been much more substantial.</p><p>But looking both ways, then again down their corridor, he heard nothing.</p><p>He left it. He was being paranoid over Richard Jones.</p><p>Tapping into his quarters, he made his way toward the closets, slowly undressed.</p><p>He wasn’t tempted to return to Thor’s realms. The after effect of leaving that place, feeling like having to physically tear himself from Bucky’s invisible presence, had been sickening. Coming out of there had merely felt a low point until he could return. He recognized the signs and was fine to stay out.</p><p>Undressed, he crawled into bed, lying on his back. Then like a long elliptical closing, he tapped around for the physical comfort of knowing the pad with Bucky’s letters were there with him. Outside, it was a quarter moon waning after a full one. Nearly a month since he’d first read Bucky’s letters. Since the letters had apparently, he’d concluded, triggered those dark dreams. Since he had finally gone home to himself and to Bucky.</p><p>It was a long time of looking at the night sky before he brought himself to a conclusion. But he did.</p><p>If he found he couldn’t . . . get between the sheets with Bucky, it changed nothing. He would love Bucky even if he had no physical body. And he would have known what love felt like even if he had never slept with Peggy or a single woman in his life.</p><p>The Steve Rogers who for too many years had looked into the mirror of his childhood home searching for a hero he could never see, that kid knew better than to complicate matters over whether he could kiss Bucky Barnes on the mouth. He didn’t even need to have reached adulthood to know what he would hold on to. To the surprise of no one from their block, church potlucks, neighborhood business owners, and even those kids at Novaks’ who’d tormented him so, he would hold on to Bucky Barnes like his life depended on it.</p><p>He would offer himself to Bucky however he found himself when Bucky woke up. In whatever condition the Wakandans gave him back, it would be his privilege and honor to spend the rest of his life taking care of him. Supporting his mental recovery as a vet of wars too strange, battles too bizarre.</p><p>And he would tell him every day, every day, that he loved him.</p><p>And what a beautiful life that would be for him, to finally understand what he felt when he looked into those eyes. Like standing under a yellow street lamp nearly a century before and seeing their warmth and depth wanting to swallow him whole. All his life.</p><p>Now he was gonna let it. God, was he ever.</p><p>They said you could never go back home, and as keenly as he wished that wasn’t true, he recognized that home, in his case now, was wherever Bucky was. He was going to love Bucky and love life as he hadn’t been able to as a tormented teenager in wonderful Brooklyn. He was going to spend the rest of his life showing up, making up, doing better.</p><p><i>Whatever Bucky needed,</i> he imagined Old Mrs Ingus importantly saying to some unknown new generation of young Brooklynites, <i>Steve got done.</i></p><p>Old Mrs Ingus would’ve been proud.</p><p>Or, more likely, scandalized.</p><p>Also.</p><p>Minutes passed, at the end of which he was blinking resolutely at the night sky. God give him strength, it was hard to even think it.</p><p>If it turned out that Bucky wanted to be with someone else, he would see that Bucky got that as well. Between him and Natasha, he was sure they could find the perfect gal for Bucky. He already knew the type — smart, brassy. A broad, they used to called them back in the day. Peggy, Louisa Keller. Really, he only had to know he’d like her himself to know she’d work out for Bucky. Especially okay since these days he was kind of done with the whole thing. The truth was that Peggy had been it for him, and past that, he could kind of take the whole love thing or leave it. Double that now that he understood what he felt for Bucky.</p><p>Of course, he’d only be finding someone for Bucky if Buck wanted to be with a woman. If Bucky was talking about some other guy, well, “unconditional love” wasn’t actually his middle name. He’d psychically fight any guy trying to muscle in on his territory. And Buck could go ahead and do whatever he wanted about it after. </p><p><i>”Steve, you don’t eva listen,”</i> he could already hear him say, and it made him smile. <i>”Why’d you go beat him up?!”</i> “Cuz I’m <i>cuter</i> than him, Bucky,” he planned on telling him.</p><p>He pushed his fist against his heart until he couldn’t tell which hurt more.</p><p>He just wanted to see him again.</p><p>Happy. Like he used to be. Smiling his grown up eyes at him.</p><p>And while the . . . other part would have been nice as well . . . he would find a way to live without it.</p><p>He didn’t know when he fell asleep.</p><p>But he woke up because someone was in his room.</p><p>He didn’t sit up. Didn’t move at all. Just opened his eyes to the dark ceiling. Blinking and instantly aware of what was wrong.</p><p>Listened.</p><p>The intruder seemed in no rush. Unconcerned about being out of place.</p><p>Instantly he thought it was Rumlow. That like Nick, Alexander Pierce was alive and they’d actually failed to take down the last of Hydra. That Bucky was still in danger. </p><p>But because the thought was about to launch him out of bed, he caught and killed it. Too much Yasmin and too many dark dreams of avenging. They had taken down Hydra. Pierce was dead. Bucky was free and safe.</p><p>So who was this?</p><p>No longer on his side but on his back, he must have been asleep much longer than he thought. His arm was also over his face, so bringing his head down for a better look wouldn’t be too noticeable. Which was what he did. </p><p>Across the room, he saw a tall, broad shouldered figure at his desk.</p><p>Casually touching and overturning things there, pushing Shuri’s communication dome across the desk with a finger as though expecting it to get up and walk, the figure seemed in no hurry. As if only marginally interested in what it was doing there. The figure then bent to something on his desk. Shoulder length brown hair dropped forward from the figure’s face.</p><p>It was Bucky.</p><p>But . . . of course it wasn’t.</p><p>Then the intruder turned toward the bay windows. And even in the silver moonlight he saw very blue eyes. </p><p>By that dim light pouring into his quarters he stared in stunned silence at the SHIELD operative known as Richard Jones. Staring out at the night sky, and taking a slow, deep breath, Rick’s eyes glassed over before he closed them against the darkness outside. Rick then slowly turned to him. Looked straight over at him on the bed. Where, in disbelief, he remained motionless. Rick watched him for a moment. Then started over.</p><p>Disorientation expanded inside his head. Confusion racing through him. His heart was about to jump out of his mouth. But he pushed back on all of it, not letting anything cloud his mind. Rigid with a need to inflict damage of a kind he hadn’t felt outside of his darkest dreams.</p><p>But not yet. Richard Jones came right over, at the foot of his bed moving around it, slowly, never taking his eyes off him, came until he was standing right beside his bed and staring down at him.</p><p>Confusion personified.</p><p>How? What was he seeing?</p><p>Rick was silent, doing nothing whatsoever besides staring down at him with Bucky’s eyes. Standing there in Bucky’s body. He was scared out of his mind. Yet he was desperately trying to tell his heart that this wasn’t Bucky. That this was some sort of apparition.</p><p>Slowly, no longer interested in pretense, he lowered his arm from his face and stared right at him. Rick went on looking at him. Head slightly tipped, staring Bucky’s warm, knowing eyes at him. As he watched, a slight smile pulled on his mouth. It was Bucky. Not an imitation, not a disguise. He could feel the warmth coming from his body, feel his breathing. He would recognize the sensations with his eyes closed.</p><p>But not only was it Bucky, standing there near enough to move his hand and touch him, it was Bucky if there had been no War. Without the ravages of the Winter Soldier program. A thing he had never thought to even imagine.</p><p>He was beautiful. Dressed in a utilitarian white T-shirt and denims. With both his arms. His hair was in a top-knot. Bucky as he would have been if all that happened was that Bucky had gone to college, graduated and found a job in the neighborhood. </p><p>Rick’s smile expanded.</p><p>“You rang?”</p><p>He blinked, heart stuck at the back of his throat and hammering to hard for him to breathe.</p><p>Rick let out of soft breath, his eyes fluttering a bit as if containing excitement. “I would never have thought,” he said in Bucky’s low, mellow tones, “that I would look into your eyes and see what I saw.” He closed Bucky’s eyes, slowly shook Bucky’s head. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited.”</p><p>Then Rick simply, slowly, moved onto his bed and knelt across his immobile body. Then slowly lowered himself until he was sitting on him.</p><p>Heart stopped, his willpower seemed gone. He laid there wishing he would close his eyes and wish this madness away. He was perfectly capable of moving. Yet he wasn’t. He couldn’t. Feeling as Hugh he had fallen off the flight deck, but instead of plummeting, he was rising.</p><p>Straddled across him, Rick reached up and stuck a finger in his top-knot, as if securing it, as Bucky would before any exertion. Then Rick stretched, drawing one arm then the other forward with a long sigh, again as Bucky would.</p><p>Rick was enhanced. There was no question. Like Wanda Maximoff, able to penetrate a person’s mind, catch their most heightened emotions and make them see what wasn’t there. It was why he couldn’t breathe. Because he knew it was manipulation . . . but it was real. Then Rick looked down at him. Locked eyes with him. A chunk of hair falling forward to frame his face as Rick smiled Bucky’s loveliest smile down at him. </p><p>“You know, when we were kids I used to imagine after I got you settled in, made you eat all the chicken soup so you could warm up, I used to imagine what you’d do if I kissed you.” Slowly, Rick slowly came forward, bent over him so. That his mouth was against the side of his face, his breath against his skin. Then he moved his mouth to his ear. “Like this,” Rick whispered. And the softest of kisses touched the side of his face. He closed his eyes, inhaling sharply and unable to exhale. “Would you have minded,” Rick continued, in as soft a voice. “Would you have kissed me back.” The mouth on his skin kissed closer to his own. “I used to dream about how it would feel, me on top of you, your arms around me. Our mouths on each other’s. I would imagine you touching me,” Rick said, pulling back his arm and finding his own. Then his hand was being gently lifted from the bed, and placed against Rick’s thigh, over his cock. He blinked in shock at the ceiling. “Right there,” Rick whispered, pressing a lingering, warm kiss at the corner of his mouth. “And kiss me . . . the way you’ve wanted to. It’s just the two of us . . .” And then . . . <i>Take me, Steve . . . </i> The voice was inside his head. <i>I’m begging you . . .</i> And then, a warm hand began pushing up his T-shirt, finding his naked skin underneath . . . <i>Let’s take our clothes off and fuck each other . . . </i> </p><p>He moved his arm, and Rick straightened and grabbed it almost as fast as thought. Pinned it there above his head. Stared Bucky’s stern look down at him. It didn’t matter. He’d pulled back his foot at the same time, and now jammed it into Rick’s chest and sent him slamming bodily into the far wall.</p><p>He swung his feet to the floor, sat up. He didn’t get out of bed, because if he did in that instant he would hurt that man. But he watched, only wishing that this creature would speak once more in Bucky’s voice and give him the excuse.</p><p>But Rick had fallen from the height where he’d put him on the wall, not to break to the floor, not even to crumple from the destruction he’d gladly sent his way, but to land neatly on his feet. Lifting his gaze, breathing, setting Bucky’s eyes on him.</p><p>In the days and weeks to come, he, Sam and Natasha would come to know a number of things about Richard Jones. None of which would give him any comfort.</p><p>Now turning, Rick suddenly dashed for the door — it swished opened and Rick sped through.</p><p>He gave chase.</p><p>Outside, he stopped a second, heard nothing whatsoever. Looking in both directions, he took off to his right on pure hope, slamming a fist on both Same and Natasha’s doors as he streaked passed. Natasha was first out. “Steve!” she shouted as he turned at the T-junction. “Other side!” he shouted back, and heard her quiet intake of breath as she spun and took off in the opposite direction.</p><p>He ran the full six decks of their section of the ship, checking upwards at the lighted decks and downward into stairwells. The corridors and steel balconies were silent, empty.</p><p>Returning to their corridor, he stopped and placed his hand on his hips, looking from Natasha to Sam, who was looking in both directions of the corridor with a blank expression. And then finally said, “I did know the difference between a knock and a pound. Yet I hesitated.”</p><p>“Rick Jones is no longer aboard,” Maria Hill told them half an hour later, inside his quarters. “Security footage shows nothing.”</p><p>“And those are answers,” Sam said, arms crossed, expression just as. Natasha, by the bay windows, said nothing. “You’re not worried that one of your operatives doesn’t seem to show up on security cameras.”</p><p>“I never said I wasn’t worried.”</p><p>“But he’s on footage everywhere else,” Natasha remarked. “And Steve and I showed up fine on cameras outside.”</p><p>There was a beat of silence in his quarters.</p><p>“I wanna ask you something,” he said to Maria. “What’s Richard Jones doing on this ship.”</p><p>Silence from Maria. There was no attempts at obfuscation this time.</p><p>Just then, Nick Fury walked in.</p><p>“Well, hello there, Nick,” he said without surprise. Sam watched Nick’s entry. Natasha didn’t. “Maybe you can shed some light on this.”</p><p>Nick raised curious eyebrows at him, seeming, he had to admit, just as curious as he was. </p><p>“I was just asking Maria why Richard Jones is clearly overseeing our mission. A low level ex-Shield operative, we’re told, having top-level clearance to one of Shield’s most secure operation. Hanging out with deputy directors, inspecting our cargo—”</p><p>“Interrogating our prisoners,” Natasha sad.</p><p>“And in his spare time watching me night after night.”</p><p>“Wait what?” Sam said.</p><p>“He was?” Natasha asked.</p><p>“Trailing me everywhere,” he continued, part of him cautioning that saying this much meant he’d have a lot to answer to later, but he was incensed. That sadistic <i>freak.</i> “Breaking into my privacy everywhere. All the way from the Netherlands now right up to private quarters thirty thousand feet in the sky. So I need to ask. What exactly is this about?”</p><p>There was total silence.</p><p>Natasha was looking around. “What?” she asked curiously. “He trailed you to the Netherlands? When?”</p><p>“It’s not important,” he said, already wishing he could take back half of it.</p><p>“Is it, or isn’t it?” Nick said, raising his eyebrows. “Is he trailing you all over the planet or this some kind of fluke incident.”</p><p>“It’s not a fluke. He did it in Arnhem. And I’ve had the feeling all week that he’s been watching me.”</p><p>Sam had turned back to the directors, “Who is this guy? Why is a Shield operative breaking into Steve’s quarters and attacking him.” Sam laughed a little. “Can somebody explain that to me, like, right now?”</p><p>Maria calmly said, “Steve hasn’t said Rick is attacking him.”</p><p>Sam rocked back on his heels, blinking at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, this dude is breaking into Steve’s quarters to leave him a backlog of birthday cards.”</p><p>Natasha turned from Sam and tipped her head at him. “What’d he want, Steve?”</p><p>He turned a direct look at her. “I didn’t ask.”</p><p>And turned back to Nick and Maria. “There’s something going on here that neither of you is telling us.”</p><p>“And vice versa,” said Nick.</p><p>“What’s that supposed to mean?”</p><p>“Captain, I <i>don’t</i> know what’s going on here. And I sure as hell don’t like that feeling. But I also didn’t know about him breaking into where we quartered you in the Netherlands. You never told me that.”</p><p>“Is he enhanced?”</p><p>There was sudden silence.</p><p>“I don’t know what—”</p><p>“Yes, you do.” He turned to Maria. “What work would that have been with Doctor Banner?”</p><p>Maria sighed, turned away with a roll of her eyes, only to face Nick staring at her with a frown. She closed her eyes, shook her head. “It’s not even any kind of security breach you’re thinking,” she said to Nick. “I literally just said to him that Rick had worked briefly with Doctor Banner. Now it’s gonna get all mixed up in this.”</p><p>“Well, of course it’s gonna get mixed up if you say things like that,” Nick said exasperatedly.</p><p>Past Maria’s shoulder, he saw Natasha at his desk, trailing a finger along the surface until it reached his laptop, where she then . . . very casually . . . slid it across the trackpad to activate it. She then began craning her neck to see where in the room a pad had been activated. “<i>Natasha,</i>” he said firmly at her, and she simply carried on as if nothing had happened, lips pursed, eyes squinting around the room like she was still looking for clues.</p><p>“Why is this guy no longer on board less than an hour after leaving Steve’s quarters?” Sam asked.</p><p>“He’s on a mission.”</p><p>“What mission?” he asked.</p><p>“Now you know we can’t tell you that,” Nick answered.</p><p>“Am I the mission?”</p><p>Nick cocked him a disbelieving look.</p><p>“As with Agent Sharon Carter, Nick.”</p><p>“Steve,” Nick said placatingly.</p><p>“No more games, Nick. Not after all that talk about trust and friendship.”</p><p>“Someone is clearly playing a game with you, Captain, but it’s not us. It’s not Shield.”</p><p>“Then is he Hydra?”</p><p>“Hydra no longer exists,” Maria said.</p><p>“Right. Just like Shield no longer exists.”</p><p>Both Shield directors fell silent. And he couldn’t help turning the screw. “I guess none of the two thousand personal onboard got the memo that they’ve been laid off. Nor, I assume, Tony Stark, who clearly spent a whole lot of time and effort upgrading this Helicarrier. And all the other ones that also don’t exist.”</p><p>Neither Nick nor Maria looked at each other. They’d been doing a great job of it since walking in, but now hit peak performance.</p><p>Sam lowered his arms. “This is some bullshit.”</p><p>“Agreed.”</p><p>But what he’d said about trust and friendship had reached through to Nick. Who had blinked his one eye defeatedly before hiding the fact. Now Nick looked out his windows. Sighed and said, “Rick is an envoy.”</p><p>When neither he, Sam nor Natasha said anything in reply to that was indecipherable to them — “For Shield,” Nick added. </p><p>“To whom?” he asked.</p><p>Nick stuck a finger straight up. Following their continued silent confusion said, “Alien worlds. Parties with information. He’s . . . had some exposure, and is enhanced. Which makes him able to . . . deal with extra terrestrial environment a little better than the average human.”</p><p>“What’s that got to do with me?” he asked heatedly.</p><p>Nick sighed quietly, while Maria simply turned away. </p><p>“Rick is . . . volatile,” Nick said. “Unstable. It’s why we generally keep him far away on remote locations of the planet.”</p><p>“What do you mean unstable,” he was suddenly saying, words pouring from him. “What d’you mean you keep him—” </p><p>Then he killed it, realizing he was reacting as though someone had spoken prejudicially of Bucky, that images were crossing-wiring in his mind. “What are you talking about,” he asked instead.</p><p>Nick sighed heavily. “I mean that this interest in you . . . may not be official.”</p><p>“You mean he has a crush on Steve.” </p><p>They looked at Natasha, who had spoken. She merely shrugged. “Coulson did. Lots of people do.”</p><p>Sam started laughing. “Why would you have an unstable, volatile super-being on your team?”</p><p>And all of them, he hated to say, himself included, turned and looked at Sam. Who took a moment to hear himself, then lowered and shook his head. “I really should have just gone back to the Air Force.”</p><p>Nick sighed heavily, though in a noticeably light manner, that against his inclination, seemed to indicate innocence. “Well, Cap. If that’s all.” </p><p>And turning for the exit after her boss,“We’ll look into this,” Maria said.</p><p>“Meantime, if he does show up again,” Nick said, one-eyeing him at the threshold. “Try asking him what he wants.”</p><p>Sam also left, casting him a troubled look. </p><p>But coming by, Natasha breezily said, “We’ll get him next time, Steve.”</p><p>And then they were all gone.</p><p>— </p><p>Alone in his quarters, he was trembling inside. Thinking about things he shouldn’t be. Trying to shake that it hadn’t been Bucky. But wasn’t it? He knew what had happened. </p><p>
  <i>Not just memory exists there, but thought itself. And thought can be unlocked . . . made physical . . . </i>
</p><p>He had brought Bucky back with him, and that creature had seen it in his eyes, in his head.</p><p>The more he tried to crash the memory with that truth, the more vividly the experience gripped him. It had shattered his preconceptions, his inadequacies, like a bullet through glass.</p><p>He had never imagined Bucky on top of him. Saying those things. It was nonsense, of course, Bucky didn’t talk like that, would never say things like that. And he would have never imagined it. But he no longer had to imagine a single thing. </p><p>He had seen Bucky in his room, on his bed, and those words would not leave him till his dying day. He had never heard anything as electrifying. Every hair on him was standing, the glass of the bay windows fogging under his breath like from a tempest coming.</p><p>He put sleep off for as long as he could, not wanting to be in bed in such a mental state. But sleep came. And he crawled in to bed.</p><p>And proceeded to have the hottest erotic dream of his life. The words caught in his head drenching him in things he couldn’t name, he saw no images, fighting it even in his dream. It didn’t matter. Clutching the pillow and hiding his face, sensation tore through him over and over. He shuddered until he awoke . . . and on his side, instantly checked himself like someone had thrown a grenade under his body . . . and he was wet.</p><p>Squeezing shut his eyes, he pulled until he had covered his face with the pillow.</p><p>Not since teenage years . . . </p><p>In his weakened state he was remembering . . . a set of memories.</p><p>That his wet dreams as a teenager had been to dreams of Bucky.</p><p>From that first afternoon in Bucky’s parents’ kitchen . . . to years later, at seventeen, imagining himself trying to have sex . . . </p><p>Not waking fantasies, but uncontrollable dreams. Deeply buried, memories now surfacing.</p><p>Of wanting Bucky to make it all make sense . . . </p><p>He opened his eyes because someone was stroking his arm.</p><p>He opened them to see Bucky seated on the edge of his bed.</p><p>He was on his side, still curled up. “Bucky,” he said hoarsely, tiredly, drained of all fight. “I had the strangest dream you cu’ ever imagine. I dreamt we was in the sky, in a spaceship, but you were gone. I was alone and couldn’t get to ya.” He wondered why Bucky was just sitting there, no books, no ointments, and he was pretty sure tomorrow was a school day. But no matter what Bucky wanted to do on that front, it would be wasted, cause he wasn’t going. “You went away,” he said, trying to control the pain in his heart. “There was a war and you went away. And I tried but I couldn’t hold on to ya. You wouldn’t leave me, would’ja Buck?”</p><p>“Steve, you’re in a dream,” Bucky interrupted softly, and he looked down at Bucky. “What?”</p><p>And suddenly he became aware that he wasn’t in Brooklyn, he wasn’t thirteen, and everything that had happened in the last one hundred years and forty-eight hours had happened.</p><p>It was Bucky, not an imposter. And looked just as he had when he had left him in Wakanda. His residual limb slung in black. Just as he had left him.</p><p>Bucky was looking at him. Smiling. “Move over?” he asked softly. </p><p>“Get in,” he gasped. “Please, please hurry.”</p><p>And Bucky moved from the edge of the bed, coming over him, lying next to him. Propped on his arm. He turned and stared at him, unable to breathe. It <i>was</i> Bucky.</p><p>“I’ve missed you,” he whispered to his salvation from childhood. Bucky laughed a little. “Why, were did I go?” And he wanted to cry and tell him, <i>You did go.</i></p><p>Instead he said, “I read your letters.” Bucky smiled some more. “You did?” He nodded. “What’d you think?”</p><p>Instead of answering, he found himself looking around the room, outside for the Tree. Was he in a Connected Realm?</p><p>“Steve,” Bucky said gently. “Look at me.”</p><p>“I loved them.”</p><p>“All of them?” He nodded. “Even the ones I was raggin’ on ya?” He kept nodding. “You sure ‘bout that?” He couldn’t even find space for humor. “Well, I’m glad you did,” Bucky said, smiling into his eyes. His hair was loose, falling against his face. Bucky had only one arm. He wanted to lift his hand and push it behind his ear. But he couldn’t. He was in a dream. “And I’m glad you kissed me. Twice.” He nodded. “How’d it feel?”</p><p>“I liked it.”</p><p>“Do you like me?”</p><p>“I love you, Bucky,” he whispered. “Everything makes sense now.”</p><p>Bucky smiled. “I have so much I want to tell you.”</p><p>“Me too,” he gasped. “Buck,” but now Bucky lowered his head and gently kissed his exposed bicep next to the sleeve of his T-shirt. And somehow he knew Bucky was leaving. “Please don’t,” he pleaded. “Bucky please just stay a while longer. Please, I have so much I wanna tell ya.”</p><p>But Bucky only leaned over, bringing his mouth to his ear, and whispered, “Meet me in Wonderland.”</p><p>His eyes closed . . . and he dreamt of falling into multicolored waters.</p><p>—</p><p>It was a slow, bleary morning that came to him.</p><p>Awake, he didn’t get out of bed.</p><p>It wasn’t possible. Nothing that had happened to him was possible. So he just closed his eyes again and went back to sleep . . . </p><p>When he woke it was because his intercom was buzzing. Sitting up, his feet on the floor, he sat there with what Natasha would call a mind-over. A hangover of the mind. The intercom stopped buzzing. He waited. It didn’t start back up.</p><p>Slowly, he stood up, went over to his desk and activated Shuri’s dome. Checked his messages. No, Bucky hadn’t miraculously woken up and left him a message. He went and showered.</p><p>When he returned he sat at the desk, arms crossed on it, the device Shuri had given him to send messages to Bucky at his elbow. She had assured him that as long as he shared the device with no one, it was the most secure communications channel on the planet. It was also the strongest sense of security he had. The most concrete thing connecting him with Bucky. He’d shared it with no one. </p><p>Placing his palm on it, he watched as the dome turned orange, the glow pulsing softly. He held his arm, where it was still hot from his dream, where Bucky had kissed it.</p><p>And watching his small piece of lifeline, he spoke timidly. It took some doing, this not exactly being how he’d thought the circumstances would be, but at last he started speaking. “I read your letters from the War. Who knew you were so literary.” He paused, not having posed it as a question. Looked down at the table. “I did,” he said quietly. “Toldja you should’a gone to college, Hemingway. ‘Stead’a hanging around the neighborhood, wasting your life looking after me.”</p><p>Slowly, he rubbed his fist against his heart, trying to ease its ache.</p><p>“I’m sorry I never got to meet Rebecca. She would’a been startin’ first grade same time as me. Your ma used to say all the time what a sweet little girl she’d been. I’m sure she would have enjoyed getting your letters.” He stared at the desktop. “You ever know the rest of the unit wrote letters too? ‘Course you did,” he immediately corrected. “You were all doing it, 'cept for me. I was busy living my dream. My whole life, having other people carry my weight.”</p><p>He stared unseeingly at the desk. Ready at last.</p><p>“I never told you how your falling into that ravine affected me. When I thought I’d lost you forever.”</p><p>It felt right. After everything, of course it did. So he kept going.</p><p>“Never told you what my life was like because of you. How much I loved the life you gave me. Eight months of sending you fancy twenty-first radio messages and I never told you a damned thing.”</p><p>Steadily, the orange glow breathed at him.</p><p>“Sam said that in the War, you were the one I was writing letters to, even when I wasn’t writing any.”</p><p>He rubbed at his chest. Pushed at it. “These are my letters to you, Bucky.” And lowering his head, he forced out the words that were breaking his heart. “Please wake up and read them.”</p><p>•</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. THE BOY NEXT DOOR</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bucky is officially healed of Hydra’s brainwashing. Bucky now has Steve on the mind. Sounds simple, right?</p>
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</div>He woke up in a distinctly placid state. Laid there watching dust in the stream of colorful dawn light coming through his open shutters. Specks floating across his bedroom like tiny galaxies in outer space.<p>He’d been having the oddest dreams of late.</p><p>Dreams of childhood. Of his teenage years.  Of the years before the war. Not memories, since memories required conscious stirring, and he’d never woken any morning wishing upon a time so far gone it was only heartache to consider it and so never did. Brooklyn was home in a way he could no longer return to, and that was that. He had enough on his plate as it was.</p><p>So where were all these dreams of Brooklyn coming from, he wondered. Dreams of running around with Steve, causing trouble, avoiding trouble; making Sarah laugh, discovering ever new leaves of life with each passing day. Nothing specific, just images, sounds and feelings coursing through his sleeping mind.</p><p>Although, just now, he could have sworn he’d actually been talking to Steve. In a dream, but not a dream. More like he’d been in some kind of . . . concurrent space with him . . . and sent him a message. What the message might be, he didn’t even know. He certainly hoped his subconscious wasn’t out there trying to get laid without his participation.</p><p>These dreams of Brooklyn were moreover odd because his dreams of Steve were always more or less the same, just amorphous erotic scenes born of being seventeen and owning up to certain things, and more recently of the morning of his stasis, when Steve had given him just enough material to kick things to another level. That vagueness to his fantasies being precisely the reason that hyper lucid one from a few weeks back had been so jolting. <i>Ha,</i> he thought, picturing the probably fine sights and sounds of him <i>erotic sceneing</i> himself right off the bed. Jolting all right.</p><p>Nonetheless, there he laid savoring feelings he really shouldn’t be dwelling on. Hearing the faint sounds of Coney Island steamboat horns, the scents of the eateries off the boardwalks, the cries of seagulls, and one very headstrong Irish guy walking next to him, making him laugh, making his heart beat out of whack by just existing. Remarkable, seeing as this guy was at the same time full of pain and anguish, physically and emotionally. The strongest person he knew. The love of his life.</p><p><i>Recommend halt forward advancement, Sergeant Barnes . . . </i> </p><p>Yeah, in a minute . . . </p><p>Dust floated within the sunshine, his body almost feeling the same. Feelings so sweet he could melt. What was all of this . . . </p><p>Soft bumping against wood interrupted his thoughts, and he snorted to himself. Brooklyn and Dodger bumping their heads against the back door, being the one closer to his bedroom. It never failed. No sooner would he settle on doing what he shouldn’t for the sake of his mental health — often, as now, merely thinking in any such direction — would those two come knocking. Those magical goats were definitely reporting to someone. The rest of the pen were starting to bleat anyway. Breakfast time for everyone.</p><p>Including for the royal visitor he was entertaining that morning.</p><p>—</p><p>“I don’t like . . .” </p><p>“I know,” he interrupted gently, before Shuri could have a fainting spell over his goat’s milk being served for breakfast. She really only ever came for his coconut rice cakes anyway, on which, thanks to Citu, the old man down the path, he was at near expert levels. He’d never told her the secret of his cakes’ appeal, being the sweetening and condensing of the same goat’s milk she so detested. </p><p>A short while before, just after his hearing had picked up the far-up hum of her Wave Rider, the delighted shrieks of the neighborhood children had confirmed her arrival in their countryside. Wave Riders being bigger and a little noisier than hovercrafts, were generally not seen in the countryside neighborhoods. So that whenever the distinct hum filled their airspace, the neighborhood children knew their princess was visiting her charge and would come running. By the time the parents had come out to join their kids to shower her with attention and greetings, it had been a decent amount of time before she loped into his home. By then he’d fully stacked the table. </p><p>Now they both sat in his beloved, personally expanded, decorated and prized kitchen. She sat, he was still at the oven checking on the cakes, which were eaten as breakfast and not dessert, waiting for the timer to ding. He also had a kettle going and it was a few minutes before that would go.</p><p>Now glancing back at the breakfast table, it was in time to catch her un-scrunched up face at his earthenware jug containing his goat’s milk. She didn’t have to drink it and she knew it. Always preferring to have her teenage drama ongoing.</p><p>“Bucky, is it supposed to smell like this?”</p><p>“Princess, there’s nothing wrong with my goat’s milk. I’ll have you know people come from far and wide to purchase. And as a matter of fact, I’ve been told it has a special property not found anywhere else.”</p><p>“What special property?”</p><p>“Extra love,” he said, unable to help his smirk. “And that’s praise from the most hard to impress person you’ll ever meet.”</p><p>She was silent, while his smile only widened. On any given day, it was lovely to have his memories — his true memories, of his true self — resorted. And not just restored, but freed of Hydra’s dark imprisonment. Wires no longer crossing to turn his own memories against him. But on some days it was more than lovely, it was downright heavenly. Not liking to go too far back, the war was often far back enough for him. Five decades of neither being able to access nor feel the associated pleasure of the way Steve had been with him in the war, and he was more than okay to have just those.</p><p>And on all given days, he had his young royal to thank.</p><p>The timer beeped, and he opened the oven door and extracted the tray of hot cakes. Turning from the oven to find her face still un-scrunched. She was as stubborn, as headstrong, as entrenched as someone he had known all his life.</p><p>“Why don’t you make tiger nut milk instead?” she asked. “Which is so much tastier, and so much less pungent.”</p><p>“Because I’m not a tiger nut farmer.” </p><p>She quietly sighed. “Bucky, I don’t mean to make a fuss,” and he could have laughed, a lot, “but would you mind if I removed it from the table? Here, I’ll help with the coconut cakes.”</p><p>Of course she would. They exchanged burdens; she took the thin clay baking sheet from him and he lifted his beautiful earthenware jug from Citu’s house warming gift set, which anyone but a princess would have found pretty goddamned amazing. Goat’s milk contents not withstanding.</p><p>“You’re very good at this,” she told him between mouthfuls. The tray was in front of her, hoarded. The cakes already vanishing. Perhaps on seeing his bemused expression, she paused, her eyes sliding around the kitchen. “Don’t you have your own?”</p><p>“I’m okay,” he said, somehow not laughing. “You can have it all.”</p><p>“Thank you, Bucky. I don’t think I’ll be able to finish all of them . . . ” She absolutely would. The manners of royals, he thought, amused, as he took a seat.</p><p>Seated, he began recalling the times spent taking Steve to Movietone reels of the world of royals. The princes of Great Britain, the elder of whom was causing trouble running around with a divorced American woman, the vastly rich, stodgy prince of Monaco, and the new young Emperor of Japan. A young man so handsome, half the dames in the theater would sigh so hard and so simultaneously that it was possible to set a timer by it. He’d be riveted, staring speechlessly at images of such an interesting world, and Steve would be looking around the theater, bored out of his skull.</p><p>Memories he really should’t be hovering over, he reminded himself, looking away, back at the kettle he was waiting on to boil. Yet here he was doing just that. Courtesy of dreams whose origins he still had no idea.</p><p>“You have a funny look on your face,” she said, just as the kettle went. He stood up, walked back to the cooker.</p><p>“I’m okay,” he assured her. Besides the coconut cakes, the morning feast he’d set out before her consisted of crisped little chunks of goat meat, succulent ripe fried plantain, which she adored because she said he sliced them perfectly like a machine, gingered cassava pap, and lastly the sweet bean pudding he was now officially addicted to, not needing to be told it was partly because of associated memories of Steve shining at him during those five days while they consumed pounds of the stuff.</p><p>On his breakfast table were also hand-painted bowls. Shuri didn’t mind goat’s milk when it was powdered, so between them sat a jug of date syrup, a bowl filled with fresh-ground cocoa and another with the powdered goat’s milk. Taking the kettle over, he carefully poured hot water into the bowl-sized mug she always used, a gallon of chocolate milk about to be consumed in his kitchen. All her.</p><p>
  <i>A little seltzer and I’d have you some egg cream.</i>
</p><p>Thankfully, she wasn’t looking at him, because he would have had a hell of a time explaining the look on his face. Still trying as he was to clear his head of how visceral the thought had been. It had been as if he could be standing there right now . . . <i>In Sarah Rogers’ kitchen, tasting before he poured.</i> </p><p>What, now he was tasting his dreams?</p><p>He set the kettle on the table, and to distract himself, asked, “Did we get in trouble for using Her Majesty’s library outside of reading hours? I never asked.”</p><p>“And don’t start now,” she answered with a peeved look, as she began mixing up her chocolate milk. “You can’t imagine the rubbish I had to deal with. I’d thrown up a matrix so that on security footage it continued showing no activity. No movement, no doors opening, no one entering. However one very smart-brained security officer said she detected quantum fluctuations in the video and so for security to double check.”</p><p>“Oh, crap,” he said.</p><p>“It’s nonsense, Bucky. Quantum fluctuation isn’t an observable phenomenon. The security officer was just trying to send me a message that they know when I’m up to funny business inside the palace.” She sucked her teeth in irritation. Then realizing she’d probably given away too much, sent him a quick, shady look. “Not that I’m up to funny business at home, mind you.”</p><p>“Of course not.”</p><p>Moving around the table, he sat down, pulling up his chair to embark on catching up on her eating. She had the appetite of a teenager, which was right behind the appetite of the average soldier. Also he was wondering at which of the hapless boys was showing the nerve to enter the palace at night. Present company exempted. Seemed she was making progress on the boyfriend front.</p><p>Out of courtesy, and around his ongoing nervousness on the topic, he asked, “How’s his Majesty?”</p><p>“He’s fine,” she said nonchalantly. “Busy as always. Nakia is around, which is always good for me. He can’t think in a straight line whenever she’s back, and disappears for hours at a time. Which means I have a lot more free time, instead of always working overtime. Brother always wanting results from morning till night.”</p><p>Who was Nakia, he wondered. “I’m sure it’s the faith he has in you.”</p><p>She was too occupied murdering the rest of the coconut cakes, guzzling her chocolate milk and vacuuming the bean pudding to even hear what he’d said. “Well, I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “It’s always amazing to have her home.”</p><p>And then she was suddenly asking, “What of you, Bucky? Do you miss home?”</p><p>When he didn’t answer, completely mystified as to how Brooklyn was suddenly in the news all day, she cast him a contrite glance with compressed  lips. “Sorry, that was rude to ask. I can’t imagine how it would be if I had to leave home for years and years and then have to be asked a question so silly.”</p><p>“Don’t apologize. I wouldn’t even know what I was supposed to be missing if it weren’t for you.”</p><p>She smiled in reply, and they ate away. “Brooklyn,” she intoned, as if referring to a place too dark and alien to picture. “<i>Bo’heer.</i> The land of origin of the White Wolf. The places beyond the forests and the valleys, beyond mighty Sahara itself.”</p><p>He smiled. “I could take you there, you know.” And she paused, staring with such quietly enlarged eyes at him and for so long that for a second he worried her family had somehow overheard and stopped time. And didn’t know how he wasn’t laughing. “Well, maybe one day.”</p><p>“Promises, promises,” she complained, twisting her lips. Delicately stuffing her face. And then was asking, “How is Captain Rojaz?”</p><p>“He’s fine,” he replied automatically.</p><p>And likewise wondered how they had gotten here.</p><p>“He will come for you, Bucky Barnes,” she replied as automatically.</p><p>It was a response all Wakandans gave him at the mention of Steve’s name. And it had taken him a long time to understand what it was — a reflex like people in the West said “God bless you” when someone sneezed. Clearly an idiom, it was one whose meaning he was dying to understand but which he was determined to discover on his own. It was language after all, and with time and application he would get it. But even without knowing whether the meaning was mundane or magical, not getting his hopes up after the fiasco with his dirty dreams, believing they meant something sacred and special, he still loved the hell out of the sound of it.</p><p>She had been asking after Steve out of common courtesy, he had replied, she had responded, and that seemed to be that.</p><p>Or so he thought.</p><p>“He loves you <i>very</i> much, you know.”</p><p>“Yeah?” he asked, not looking at her.</p><p>“Yes. I know you won’t remember it too well, but when we were putting you back in stasis to cure you, he was like a lioness being separated from her cub. You know they are very temperamental when that happens.”</p><p>He found he couldn’t quite respond. She hardly ever brought up that time, perhaps out of respect for his privacy. And it had never occurred to him to ask. She now sent him a look from across the table. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up— I don’t know what’s wrong with me this morning.”</p><p>“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Seeing they’d cleaned out the pudding, he picked up the bowl and returned to the cooker where a pot stayed warm. He began scooping. Then, maybe not very wisely, said, “Go on.”</p><p>“Okay,” she said immediately, excitedly. “That was how I knew he is in love with you. Not just loves you, but <i>in love</i> with you. It was so touching. Even though he had been driving us crazy up until then. Totally willing to contravene my brother, which still makes me tremble just thinking about it. You wouldn’t understand. You were not fully aware so you don’t know, but that period was not a good one for me. Brother wanted nothing but perfect results, the whole Kingdom expecting nothing less, <i>including Mother,</i> and I myself knowing what I and my team were capable of. But Bucky, there we all were. Stuck because Captain Rojaz would not bring you in. He wouldn’t even respond to my <i>texts.</i> We were <i>trembling</i> under the pressure.” She sighed. “Adults can be so annoying and entitled sometimes. Anyhow,” she drawled tolerantly. “All is well when results are well.”</p><p>Turned from the cooker, he’d been staring at her for a while. Long before wondering what she meant by Steve contravening the King, and way before she lost her point wandering into her story.</p><p>Right around, <i>he’s in love with you.</i></p><p>“You can’t know that,” he heard himself saying.</p><p>Without needing an explanation, she eyed him. “Can’t I?”</p><p>“Steve and I love each other as ch—”</p><p>“Oh, Bucky, please. There’s a difference between caring for someone’s well-being the way we care for those we love, and being in a state where a person is about to step off a cliff and fall to their death and they’re still not aware. That was Captain Rojaz. If you don’t believe me, when next he comes, just keep your distance and see what happens. See whether he doesn’t chase you all over Wakanda.”</p><p>He hadn’t taken a breath the entire time. She looked amused. “I don’t how this is news to you. Adults are so <i>funny.</i>” Then she laughed outright, squinting momentarily as though he had to be kidding. “Bucky. Seriously?”</p><p>“Well,” he answered, covering, turning back to the cooker. “I’ll leave it to you, o expert one.”</p><p>Three weeks of fighting himself to conquer every last one of his deep-seated fears around Steve, that Steve didn’t reciprocate his feelings, that he was going to lose him in a way too profound to understand, nearly a month into his and Steve’s dreamland victory, and all it had taken was to hear her assessment aloud to reduce him to an upright pounding heart.</p><p>It was real. It was happening. As soon as Luma gave the word he would be calling Steve and it would no longer all be in his head. They would be together again in the same physical space and time and—</p><p>And before he could block it, he began seeing his eyes, his smile, his skinny body—</p><p>His heart was squeezing so hard it was hurting him. So much that he was a little startled when she spoke.</p><p>“How do you grind the cocoa so fine out here in the villages?” she asked. “This is amazing for mere handiwork.”</p><p>He glanced at her. “We have electricity here in the lands beyond, no different than in Zana.”</p><p>She looked vaguely surprised.</p><p>—</p><p>He spent the next few days trying not to think about Brooklyn. So of course that was all he could think about. </p><p>With his old mister-goat in its last days, he was taking the time to tend to it specially. So later that morning he was watching the tired old goat at rest in his lap, suckling from a bottle like a baby all over again.</p><p>The cycle was living and dying, he thought while slowly, rhythmically stroking under its chin. Smiling to himself as its eyes drooped tiredly in the morning sunshine. Living and dying. Only the wars, loves and magic that happened in-between held any meaning.</p><p>His charge fell asleep before the liquified grass feed was finished, and he gently moved it to the emerald grass before slowly withdrawing his arm. Then he set the bottle on the grass and sat back, resting his arm on his knee as he stared toward the neighborhood square. The kindergartners having wrapped up since, it was now a few teenage artisan apprentices sitting under the shade practicing on personal projects. </p><p>Some kids liked the noise of the city, to talk and party and have fun all day. Others preferred the peace and quiet of the countryside, to stay silent and let their hands do the talking, bring the gratification.</p><p>Some kids fell in love and stayed that way. And others didn’t so much as notice.</p><p>On the morning of his stasis, he remembered how Steve had desperately pushed memories of their past. The way Steve had when they’d tracked down Helmut Zemo to the Siberian base that had been his home for fifty years. </p><p>What Steve hadn’t realized was that the memories were all there. Just rewired, so that innocent memories connected to and triggered the wrong actions. So the treasured, therefore strong memory of a fun ride at a theme park became the source code for imminent threat — therefore turn and kill. It was an easy trigger. He’d give it to those Hydra scientists, they’d certainly known their stuff. Known just what to do with the Super Soldier serum.</p><p>Thankfully, Shuri knew her stuff better. What she had done for him defied explanation. One morning he was all but mindless, the next, it seemed, waking up and he was Bucky Barnes again. Waking in a private room in Shuri’s lab, inhaling that chilly air in which they’d kept him to let his body acclimate. The muted sounds of the lab staff several rooms over had been among the subsequent things he’d heard. The first had been the silence in his head. Freed of Hydra’s triggers, no longer hearing the click-click-clicks, gears in motion, a waking brain in a constant receptive state for instruction. <i>Bucky,</i> he’d heard next, so softly it might have been his imagination. It had certainly not been any handler’s voice. That voice had been Steve’s. And he’d opened his eyes, searched the sterile room, but he’d known Steve wasn’t there, because it had felt like just a few hours ago that they had said see you later. Then the room door had gently opened, and Shuri had walked in, smiling at him. Came to stand at the foot of his bed. As self-assured as only a teenage genius could ever be.</p><p>“Welcome back, Sergeant Barnes,” she’d said. “It’s good to have you with us again.”</p><p>Absolutely, she had cleaned him up mentally. Pristinely. So much so that those first few months had been a pure assault of memories — deep, endless, murderous and merciless — with the attendant full range of emotions. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, from resentment to blame, from guilt to a really painful rage. A mental evisceration of a kind he simply didn’t know how he had survived, much less gotten healed from, except that there truly was a form of magic in this place. Although he sure had lost the faith many times. Frustrated repeatedly by the process, setting himself weeks back sometimes by his own fear and obstinance. But in the end he had faced the hard work, since, as Luma had pointed out to him from the beginning, it wasn’t as though either of them had somewhere to be.</p><p>But memories were people. And the following morning when he had returned to the royal apartments where he’d been staying before the procedure, he’d known instantly that there was a certain person he did not yet want to see.</p><p>The care box had been there, sitting exactly where Steve had left it one month ago. Replenished, when he opened and looked. Mind made anew, he recalled intensely their five days together. When Steve had been doing and saying everything to bring him back. And apparently, dodging her and the King. And then that last night, when Steve had been doing everything in his power not to simply take him in his arms. A memory he <i>really</i> could have used in the subsequent months.</p><p>But there had been memories that had laid in his mind like two dimensional paintings on glass. Like he could stand there and look down at them, clear and swirling, awaiting any touch to make them rise in three dimensions and become real again.</p><p>But those had been his most cherished memories, which he had instinctually known he had to leave as they were if he wanted any hope of moving forward.</p><p>He had pushed down Brooklyn since waking. But now it seemed, true to form, Brooklyn was pushing back.</p><p>Soft nudges came against both sides of him, and now mom and pops were suddenly there, burrowing their heads and bodies under his arm and sling. He had only to glance at them to know all three of them knew what he was about to do. And that only one of them thought it wasn’t the absolute worst idea he’d had since awaking. </p><p>But as always, he appreciated their support.</p>
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</div>At the central city library, he went to look at videos of Steve, team leader of the Avengers, against whom the King fought for the capture of the suspected killer of the King. Had Steve not fought to his dying breath to clear him, T’Challa would have been the one to end his reign of terror. Whether he had committed that particular atrocity would have been beside the point. Helmut Zemo would have eventually been caught and stopped for his crimes, but so would he. It was strange fate that the one who would have killed him was also the one who had chosen to save him.<p>Now because of those events, Wakanda had an extensive database on the Avengers. The more security sensitive files were stored in the closed systems of the palace library, but outside of sneaking in for arguably legitimate purposes, he avoided the palace categorically. Besides, what he wanted weren’t classified files anyway.</p><p>It was late morning, and the library, one of the giant tubes of polarized glass and vibranium he and Steve had flown by that first night of their outings, was mostly empty of people. At least in its main room. Most people being at work, he presumed. But whether at the long tables with the warm morning light crowning the wide open space above it, or strolling along the shelves that ringed the reading room, people turned to look as he passed. He returned the nods he got. While their King filled him with existential dread, the population itself never failed to welcome him wherever he went.</p><p>Including here at the library, where he had been a number of times, reading histories of East Africa and, early on, studying Wakandan grammar books. And now walking through the main room, he began catching fleeting images of himself as a teenager in their own branch of Brooklyn Public Library, frantically abandoning the myriad books he was reading because someone had rushed in to tell him Steve was being turned into a punching bag somewhere.</p><p>Reaching the audiovisual room, he slowly pushed his way in. Video of course could be viewed anywhere, including in his own home, but he kept nothing pertaining to his former life in his house. And the video room had booths for privacy. Never actually having used the section, he made his way to the librarian’s desk.</p><p>The old man there glanced up, and on seeing him stopped tapping and swiping at his desktop to instead stare in wonder at his approach.</p><p>“Hi,” he said to the librarian on reaching the desk. </p><p>“Sergeant Barnes,” the old librarian replied, softly. “What a pleasant surprise. How are you this morning?”</p><p>“Pretty good, thanks.”</p><p>“Excellent,” the old librarian said gently, inquisitively. “And how is goat farming treating you?”</p><p>He couldn’t help a small laugh. “Not bad at all.”</p><p>The librarian nodded, as though getting important answers. “How may I help you?”</p><p>He told the old man what he was looking for, and the librarian nodded, waving him over while slowly making his way from behind his desk. A small, dark, professorial old timer, who began leading him toward a booth. “It is a true pleasure to meet you, Sergeant Barnes. The living legend of the Bo’heer. One assumed to have slain our King. Compelling your brother to rise and unmask the story of not only <i>not</i> being the slayer, but that you yourself were the victim of soul snatchers. A true warrior’s tale. A warrior whom the Ancestors themselves will surely grant a special peace.”</p><p>When he’d first woken up in Wakanda, he’d been taken aback and daily surprised by their facile acceptance of the complexity of human experience. Every day he understood a little more how fortunate he was to have been brought to their country. </p><p>And now, always moved by it, he nodded his thanks to the old librarian. Strolling at a snail’s pace, the old man leaned over a little, lowering his voice. “I hear you are being healed by the Water Women?” At his nod, in a voice even lower, “Are they as crazy as everyone says?”</p><p>He laughed under his breath. “Definitely.”</p><p>The old man threw back his head and laughed joyously. “Crazy, beautiful old mermaids. That’s what I heard they are. I wish I could swim my way to them.” They had reached the booths. “Well, here you are. The commands are audio and touch, the booths are soundproof, so you may confidently speak your requests. But be very specific, as the system is very fussy.” The old man patted his slung shoulder. “Ask if you need anything.”</p><p>While the librarian returned to his desk, he slowly entered the booth. Nervous now that he was here. So nervous he couldn’t sit. Still unsure of what was pushing him to do this. Picking up the headset, he pulled it on, then leaned his shoulder against the booth’s partition wall. His eyes on the video panel set into the booth’s wall, he spoke the words, “Steve Rogers, all records.” </p><p>Then he realized he wasn’t nervous. It was excitement of a kind he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.</p><p>The screen instantly filled with small rectangles of looping videos. Various events throughout the world captured on video. </p><p>A glance at the top of the panel showed results in the millions. And quietly, with a streak of lapis blue light across the top to indicate activation, the AI asked in a surprisingly condescending male voice whether he would like to narrow his search terms. Taking a silent breath, he asked it to show him videos before 1945. The videos erased themselves before his eyes until there were under a hundred. In informing him about the archive, Shuri had explained that aside from the videos the Army had later used for promotion, the detailed recordings of Steve’s transformation process were among those classified in the palace databases. That was fine. He didn’t need them.</p><p>Hoarsely, unable to make his voice any stronger, unlike his determination, he asked the AI to remove all the ones containing Captain America or his transformation. </p><p>He was left with a couple dozen videos. Everything the Army had declassified of Steve during Army training camp. Dailies of SSR’s Project Rebirth — recruitment, training, candidate interviews, a few instances of physiological testing. The videos filled the screen, in slightly larger rectangles this time, and almost before he was fully ready, he was looking at him. </p><p>His Steve.</p><p>A long while later, he blinked and looked away, giving his wet, blurred vision time to clear. Still, he needed time. The rubberized wall of the booth just wouldn’t come back into focus no matter how much time he was giving it. He swiped his knuckle across his eyes.</p><p>Then reaching forward, he tipped the video panel downward as he sat down, setting his head against the wall. Eyes never having left the screen.</p><p>He watched the looping images for a while, not knowing where or how to start. Then extending a hand, he tapped on one in which Steve was undergoing a psych eval.</p><p>Paused, the video image filled the screen.</p><p>His face. His hair. His skinny body in a baggy Army T-shirt and his dog tags in danger of getting lost in the T-shirt’s folds on his chest. The fierce determination on his face. But he could see Steve’s nervousness too because he was sure Steve still wasn’t sure it wasn’t all a dream. That he wouldn’t get called outside and kicked out at any minute. He had told him to stay home, to stay safe, but there he was getting into the biggest trouble of them all. All alone this time and looking like he had lost his way home.</p><p>He had never seen video of him.</p><p>It was surreal.</p><p>Indescribable.</p><p>He was as bewitching, as hypnotizing as he remembered. Exactly as he had left him. </p><p>He stared while it seemed years passed, while a world of emotion pressed down on his heart. </p><p>Gasping, he wiped his arm over his face, trying to take a breath, trying to stop the tears he wasn’t aware had started. What the fuck was happening. But the more he tried the more it only hurt, and then he remembered he wasn’t supposed to block when things slipped free inside him. So he just held his head and cried.</p><p>He shouldn’t be crying for a sickly body cured. Or for a mind’s torment erased. He shouldn’t be crying for their lost lives because they had their lives.</p><p>And yet he cried in pained longing for him. For the boy he himself had once been. To the young man he had later become, who had wanted once, just once, to be held by him. To be kissed anywhere at all, the way the later, newer version had finally done. To have heard him say any combination of words on which he would have rearranged their entire lives.</p><p>He had loved him with all his heart, and missed him with even more.</p><p>And they had left him behind.</p><p>Pulling up his jersey, he pressed it to his eyes and simply cried. </p><p>Until he had nothing left in him. Until he felt a blissful, if temporary emptiness.</p><p>He sighed, slowly sat back with his head against the wall. Stared mindlessly at his image. </p><p>After a while he reached over and resumed play. The video started up. The presence slight on the screen, yet filling it, spilling out. Steve’s determined gaze moving over his interviewers behind the camera before coming to a halt on one of them. There were murmured instructions offscreen, to which Steve nodded, then focused his gaze directly into the camera.</p><p>He remembered the near permanent furrow, the big, troubled things in his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. </p><p>“My name is Steve Rogers,” his image began, his gaze directly on him, but even after a hundred years still not seeing him. “And I’m from Brooklyn, New York.”</p><p>—</p><p>That he was in love with Steve had come as no great surprise to him. He must have been fourteen when he realized it. Not the childhood love he had known all his life, instead the hormonal one that came so unexpectedly with puberty. It took until seventeen or thereabouts to finally let himself accept it. His delay, he suspected, had to do with Sarah. He hadn’t wanted her to feel that he’d been in her house being suspect with her son the entire time. Although probably the reality was that she saw his predicament quite clearly. Still, inside her house, he had behaved himself properly, always. Never getting too handsy with Steve the way he could and did outside.</p><p>But boy, when his flame lit for scrawny little Steve Rogers, it had been bad. Steve got to thirteen and the wonders of puberty seemed to light him up from within. Regarding his own emergence into teenage years, the only thing he had found all that fascinating was that his voice was breaking. He’d found that rather inconveniencing. But with Steve, it was like an enchantment unfolding. Steve’s eyes practically glowed, his skin the same, and each time Steve flushed a dull pink from actually hearing his praise on some occasion, sending a smile his way, he would feel as if he was about to pass out.</p><p>Yet the momentous thing he accomplished emotionally between ages fourteen and twenty was realizing that he would never have Steve Rogers.</p><p>Steve wasn’t into guys, and that was that.</p><p>Actually, even dames wouldn’t have fared much better. Not with the mental anguish Steve carried. Steve’s impenetrable world had always been just that. Romantic love, past the usual bouts of the hots had just been things in movies. Steve had wanted validation, achievement, a sense of accomplishment. Behind which even he, with all the love Steve bore for him, took a back seat.</p><p>Nonetheless. All his life, he had only ever seen Steve with him. Only him.</p><p>And yes, he knew exactly what that meant for the era in which they lived. Therefore, heading into his twenties, arranging their lives going into the future was all he thought about. By the time of his deployment, when Steve had nearly broken them both on that Boston Harbor pier — that morning being the second, but certainly the most inconvenient moment in his life when he had nearly told Steve how he felt about him — he had already been putting concrete plans in place.</p><p>It was only during the period in the war — ironically, when other sergeants were sitting around planning on how they would return and finally marry their girls — when it had been such a strain to be with Steve, his emotions so confused it reached a point where he couldn’t even be around Steve, that he had found himself suspending ever plan he had ever made. Thankfully that passed.</p><p>But his plans had been relatively simple. It wouldn’t have mattered whether they had both gotten married to dames they’d dated and settled down and had kids like everyone else. His plan was simply to stay with Steve. Together or alone, they would have never left Brooklyn anyway, and by eighteen Steve had already inherited Sarah’s brownstone. And had it come to it, he would have found Steve a girl to marry. All that would have mattered was that he and Steve be together.</p><p>And yes, he had been prepared to live with a certain amount of emotional dishonesty. If Steve had wanted to run away together and join the merchant marines or something, that would have probably made their lives relatively easier. Wandering to far off places where no one knew them and where he could have better hopes of properly seducing Steve Rogers.</p><p>But if it was going to be Brooklyn, he’d been prepared to take care of everything. Same as all the other adults like him, in his situation, were invisibly doing. He certainly wouldn’t have been alone for psychological support. Plus his dishonesty would have only been half, as he would have been able to love whomever he had married. And everyone already knew that he and Steve came as a pair, so he didn’t know that he would have necessarily wanted to get into obvious discussions about it. Besides, he was pretty sure a few dames suspected his true feelings for Steve Rogers anyway. His other love, Louisa Keller, had certainly teased him enough about it.</p><p>So had he returned from war and found Steve waiting for him on those docks, and had Steve still been insisting on being alone, he would have made Steve a home in Sarah Rogers’ brownstone that Sarah would have been proud of, and spent the rest of his life being there for Steve. Pulling that off without ever a day in which Steve could show him the kind of love he wanted would have made him perfectly happy.</p><p>He would have done all that and lived with whatever consequences, because for him there was no alternative. He had loved Steve all his life, and even at rock bottom Steve had clung to him, so there was no scenario in which that could change.</p><p>Except nothing like any of that happened. What happened instead was that one day during the war, he’d had a stranger walk up to him, talking and smiling and calling himself Steve. <i>His</i> Steve.</p><p>—</p><p>From the outskirts of Zana, it was about a two hour walk home. Which was where he ended his ride on the hovercraft. Above him was the Milky Way. The Backbone of Night. Because even the sky itself needed one.</p><p>In the onyx night, racing Wave Riders streaked far overhead, hovercrafts much lower. The lights looked like UFO formations, zipping and zig zagging through the heavens underneath the celestial streak of diamond stars. The walking path ran alongside a forest, open grassland on the opposite side. </p><p>Head down, hand shoved inside his sling, over his heart, he walked home.  The glowing eyes of wild animals peering from behind forest leaves following him all the way. His mind far down a memory hole.</p><p><i>Buck . . . Bucky, ma’ heart’s breaking.</i> It was real, he was leaving him. The morning had come. But he’d be back to him, he knew it. They’d see each other again. He had a future all figured out for them. They had so much they were gonna do and be together. </p><p><i>Is it permanent?</i> was the next thing he was hearing, his own voice, his own words, his mind reeling, his senses in a confused riot. <i>So far . . . </i> </p><p>Yes, the right answer was yes.</p><p>During the war, when the stranger appeared, it had been all he could do to not stare at him nearly every waking minute. And sometimes even when Steve was sleeping. He wished no one that kind of shock to the system. A stranger smiling at him with Steve’s eyes. Speaking to him with Steve’s voice, telling him Steve’s jokes. He had found him . . . Well, truthfully, there was no description for what he had gone through. There still wasn’t, except to say that he had suffered a schism. That Steve had been gifted with a body at the apex of health had only registered, to his own shame, in fleeting. That it had been a beautiful form had meant even less, near meaningless to him. There were good-looking people everywhere. Nothing had mitigated the matter — it had taken a lot for him to stabilize. He had struggled badly with the feeling that he was dealing with an imposter. His senses recognized Steve: Steve’s eyes, Steve’s smile, Steve’s wicked sense of humor. But his heart had refused, and in small ways he would search Steve’s face as Steve spoke, looking for anything that would take him home. And that night in Lucca he had found it. He would have found it, because it <i>was</i> Steve, but each day of his schism was an ugly one for him, having to struggle with both his love and his confusion. But he did find him. </p><p>And what he found was a changed Steve.</p><p>Not in the way he had most feared, thankfully, instead Steve had shed his anguish. No less fierce and no less intense, no less of a wiseass. But Steve’s mind and body had aligned, and his happiness was something to experience. It used to leave him shaking inside. His adorable, hilarious Steve was all there, whole and healthy, just as Sarah had prayed each and every day. And the times they would have quiet moments together, and Steve would sit and talk to him, his Steve would shine right through. That night outside of Lucca when he had been cleaning him up, and Steve had done his impression of a dame, just like Steve used to when they were teenagers, everything had just clicked. Steve had smiled into his eyes like Steve hadn’t since home. And he saw not just Steve, but <i>both</i> of them at last. Steve and Bucky, just like no time had passed. Talk about shaken, it had TNT’d his core. He honestly didn’t know how he had held it together. That had been only the third time in his life he had almost done what he knew he couldn’t. Just once, a kiss. But, at the time anyway, Steve’s confidence and happiness had been reward enough.</p><p>And holy God, had he then revised his plans. Out went the brownstones, the domestic life. It <i>was</i> the merchant marines now, and wherever the Army sent Steve was where the mail could find him too. He had planned on being Steve’s sidekick if he had to quit the Army to do it.</p><p>But Steve had always lived in his own world, and soon enough he discovered that post transformation, no less so. There had been no subsequent sudden awareness of the thing flowing from his heart at him. There were fleeting seconds when he had thought Steve looked at him and maybe began having an inkling, but that could have as easily been his imagination. And war had not been the time to start trying to make himself seen by Steve.</p><p>And then they had been pulled apart by what should have been both their deaths. It had ended there — his love unrequited. His Steve twice gone.</p><p>And then one monotonous afternoon, a kill mission like any other — the men changed, the uniforms changed, the location changed, but for an automaton, it was monotony — Steve’s voice was penetrating the dense fog around what for five decades had passed for his mind. And then he was looking across a concrete landscape at him. Neither of them were dead.</p><p>Holed up in a foreign land for two years obsessively looking at images of him in his colorful costume, trying to make his mind stop clicking long enough, stop ticking in search of triggers and instructions, so he could remember who this person was, why he had laid down before him willing to die rather than end the life of his hunter. Until Steve found him in Romania. Steve <i>wasn’t</i> gone. And neither was he. But they had been torn from each other, both now transformed in strange ways. Both having to find their way back to each other.</p><p>He didn’t know what for Steve it had felt like, to see him hardly with a mind and having to accept that this might be him now, permanently dulled and broken.</p><p>But, for him, it seemed his own reset of Steve had gone too far back.</p><p>—</p><p>At night, the Dome over Wakanda acted like a film of soap bubble, against which ambient light did equally artificial things. Was absorbed somehow, so that the night sky remained a pitch black. </p><p>Returning to the dimmed and silent library the following night, all but the warm white floor lights were quenched, and the night sky was rendered as if the ceiling above. Stars glittered close. </p><p>A young woman with her nose in a book had replaced the old librarian for the nightshift. She didn’t look up when he entered, just waved a finger above her book and said, “Any one.”</p><p>Back inside the booth, he dived head-first into the videos. If a person could be devoured by sight alone, the Project Rebirth videos would be missing one small, skinny soldier. He took in the state of Steve’s helmet and uniform, his dog-tags and boots, checking whether every detail had been paid attention to, every speck polished. Steve who had never stitched his own clothing probably until training camp. He wondered how the doctors at camp had handled those frightful, hacking coughs, no doubt wondering how the hell Steve was even in their offices to begin with, especially within the Super Soldier project. </p><p>He ate up every inch of him. Those luminous eyes he had hoped any moment would look his way and suddenly register what he wasn’t even hiding. That hair that after a certain age he’d known to start resisting brushing off Steve’s forehead. To start resisting him in general. The funniest, sweetest guy he had ever met. The one who had given him an unshakable friendship, come hell or high water.</p><p>When he was eighteen, he had almost kissed him. </p><p>The experience had marked the first, and maybe a forgivable time in their lives when he had nearly lost himself with Steve. </p><p>Just once, aching like his body was being pummeled, he had almost unbearably wanted to offer himself physically to make Steve feel better. He could do it for nearly anyone else and it hurt something awful that he couldn’t with the one person for whom he seemed made to do just that. Just once, he had wanted so much to feel it with him.</p><p>That had been the period when things had gotten so rough for Steve that on some days Steve couldn’t have him in his orbit. That particular day, Steve had been in the phase of wanting to make the school’s swim team. Spent all day avoiding him, then around eleven at night sent someone to come knocking at his parents’ door with a message to meet him on the beach down at Coney Island. One guess how he’d felt.</p><p>Not long after, they found themselves on Sarah’s back porch, Steve coughing hard, but each time only once in an effort to bury the rest of it.</p><p>“Ah, Steve.”</p><p>“I’m all right, Buck.”</p><p>“Why’re you in water at midnight? <i>Why?</i> Why’s it so hard to make you listen.”</p><p>Another wet hack. “I’m fine. Just gotta get inside. Warm up a little.”</p><p>By this time Steve was able to take care of his lighter ailments on his own, no longer needing him for small cuts and bruises and the like, or figuring out which liquids not to take straight from the bottle.</p><p>So there he stood. Forced to back off, yet somehow that night finding it impossible to take his eyes off Steve’s frail body. His protruding collar bone and sharp elbows, and every other visible skeletal feature, sunburned where it showed. Meaning the midnight swim was likely the tail end of some other seriously inadvisable activity. </p><p>Forever wanting to touch his finger to his jaw and make him look at him, normally always having to settle for just placing a hand on his shoulder, this time he kept both his hands at his sides.</p><p>He was eighteen and things had simply started feeling . . . severely different.</p><p>Then came the sad, achy glance that always slipped out and winged itself at him. Lingered on him. Because Steve himself didn’t know what drove him to such madness. Only seeming to know that he needed him there when it got particularly bad.</p><p>All their lives that look had been his—unneeded—cue to get Steve inside and get to work remedying the damage before Sarah could see.</p><p>But not on that dark night.</p><p>That night, for no discernible reason, Steve’s sunburn, already desperately needing tending to before it peeled away whatever skin he had left, combined with that helpless look, all seemed to be calling to him very, very differently.</p><p>And suddenly he was standing there taking in Steve’s sorrowful look in a heavy, airless trance. His entire being seeming to slowly pool in his groin. Then he did it. It hadn’t been a calculated thing. Not even something done fully consciously. He glanced at the dark windows of the house. And heard himself speaking.</p><p>“Sarah home?”</p><p>“Naw, she’s staying over at the Cortez’s. Both their little girls are sick.”</p><p>He even remembered registering a beat. But it hadn’t at all been a noble one.</p><p>“Can I come in?”</p><p>It was only as Steve spoke, and only because Steve’s answer was lengthy enough, brushing him off that he was fine, it wasn’t too bad and he could find whatever he needed, that the fevered, cross-eyed moment slowly began releasing him.</p><p>And there he stood, following Steve with a slow turn of his head, who had already turned and was opening the screen door. Still seeing himself leaning down, brushing his mouth along the sunburn on his collar bone, soothing it with his lips. Pulling those skeletal arms around his waist and sliding his hands into that hay hair that was as straight as Steve himself, holding him and kissing all over his face.</p><p>Shaken, he had watched Steve go. Opening the porch door and stepping inside, thanking him, and letting the screen door slowly swing shut behind him as he closed the door.</p><p>In a mindless state, he had turned and looked at the wooden steps leading down to the empty lot that had long since become a community garden.</p><p><i>Take yourself home, Bucky</i> he’d thought desperately. <i>Before you get yourself in trouble.</i> Before he embarrassed himself and tarnished his most cherished relationship. There were plenty of guys and girls who would let him in any time, day or night, if that was what he needed. It was what he needed. But not what he wanted.</p><p>What he wanted, all he had ever wanted, was him.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>≈≈</p>
</div>With the fall rains coming, he had embarked on a home improvement project. Canopies for his windows. So he spent most of his afternoons in his woodworking shed. Past the pens, at the treeline of the forest, the shed sat in a cool clearing, and there he often enjoyed peace and solitude with the flora and fauna of East Africa.<p>Although this morning he was also having to share it with two very concerned looking goats. Brooklyn and Dodger, seated on the ground across from him at the lathe, seemingly at a loss of what to do with him.</p><p>It had been after midnight the night before when he returned from the library, to find them asleep on his front step as usual. They’d woken up to the quiet hum of the hovercraft, and as he dropped silently to not disturb the neighbors, they’d raised their heads at him. Then got up and proceeded to gaze worriedly at him. Even as he’d stepped over them to enter his home, scratching their ears, their dismayed looks had followed him inside.</p><p>When he had first gotten the herd, he’d tried penning them with the rest, but right from the start they hadn’t been having it, refusing to be locked in. It had made for high comedy to watch Citu try to contain them for weeks and the two of them steadily evading pursuit. So had their own shelter outside the pen’s gates, but even that they seldom used.</p><p>Now, as of that morning, they were apparently not letting him out of their sight ever again.</p><p>Meanwhile he heard Citu’s approach long before they turned their heads toward the sound of footsteps.</p><p>The old man greeted him, commended him on the project, and he thanked him.</p><p>Then Citu smiled and politely said, “Bucky, might I ask you a question?”</p><p>“Of course.”</p><p>“We have not seen you leaving for the River sides in some time. We’re getting a bit worried.”</p><p>He smiled up from his workbench. “Healing’s over. Just waiting for my official graduation date.”</p><p>Citu’s eyes lit up. “Well— congratulations, Bucky. Then we must celebrate.”</p><p>So that evening his neighbors threw him a small impromptu party in their little neighborhood square. Around a small bonfire, palm wine and <i>degewor</i> flowing, one of the fathers who moonlighted as a drummer tapping out a rhythm that seemed to be telling a story. But among the children, a small flap was brewing.</p><p>The trio of little artists was grossly disappointed because the adults had told them he no longer needed protective spells painted on him. The rather unwelcome news was generating a lot of pressing up against parents and whispered grumbling. Feeling bad, he whispered to one of the mothers next to him whether there wasn’t something else the kids could paint instead. Things that weren’t spelled and hopefully wouldn’t subject him to drama from his subconscious.</p><p>The mother laughed in amusement. “Certainly. There are lots of things. Pretty art they can do.”</p><p>He nodded to the kids. “Go get your paints,” he said in Wakandan, and the trio instantly sped off without waiting for their parents’ approval. </p><p>Shortly, the kids returned with calabashes filled with colorful clay powder, and kneeling a semi circle before him, began drawing out simplistic, stylized, sample motifs onto the hard clay of the ground. Motifs which still looked pretty impressive for kids’ work if you asked him.</p><p>Their little leader, twists now in a bun atop her head and colorful artist’s smock thrown over her dress, knelt at the head of their markings pointing each out to him. “This one is the butterfly and it means you are free. This one is the meerkat and it means you are smart. This one is the antelope and it means you are victorious.”</p><p>“Give him victory,” Citu said from the other side of the circle.</p><p>“Ah, I don’t know about that quite yet,” he muttered.</p><p>“If the Women have declared you healed, then you are victorious. All that remains is your own belief.”</p><p>He eyed the markings. “And you said these aren’t spelled with magic.”</p><p>“No,” Citu said, laughing. “It’s <i>lotu</i> art. Just good old fashioned tattoos for showing off achievement.”</p><p>The mother next to him laughed breathlessly.“Children can’t work magic, Bucky. It’s all in your imagination.”</p><p>“Oh, where’ve I heard that before.” And while they all continued being amused, “How long does it last?” he asked.</p><p>“About two weeks,” the mother said.</p><p>He sighed, gave it another moment’s thought. “All right, let’s get it done.”</p><p>Thus commenced the artistry. The motif of victory: the antelope — an upside down triangle with two zig-zagged lines protruding from the top. Painted over and over, in onyx and ruby, downward from his shoulder to right below his wrist. He fell asleep long before they were done.</p><p>When he woke up the square was empty, the bonfire had died down and there was a sheet over him where he was lying in the bamboo recliner, his arm exposed for the paints to dry. By his foot was a little vibranium lamp, glowing it’s warm blue light over mom and pops. He picked up the lamp and headed back up the small hill, then he went and stood by their pen to see whether they would go get themselves a good night’s sleep and stop worrying about him. </p><p>They didn’t enter. Stood there looking pointedly at him. Hardly believing he was having a standoff with a pair of goats, he returned their stare. And they moved. But instead of their own pen, they entered the herd’s and went and laid down on either side of old mister-goat.</p><p>He stared for a moment, snorting and shaking his head with disbelief.</p><p>Then laughed outright when on reaching his front door, he saw them quickly get to their feet, watching to see whether he was about to call down a hovercraft to go do what he really shouldn’t. He smiled and he stepped inside, closed the front door.</p><p>—</p><p>Evidently not kidding about the free time this Nakia could bring, it was just after three in the afternoon when he and Shuri were out trekking through the wilderness. An animal sighting trail of the kind he and Steve had done during those five days, though they’d mainly stayed in the Wave Rider. This was a two-hour walking trail, and it was pretty crazy to see the animals coming out to sit and watch them passing, leopards quietly lounging in trees, long-haired monkeys stopping and staring, as though the humans were the entertainment.</p><p>They strolled along, and he listened while Shuri talked. Shuri was having boyfriend issues. One of them was proving rather impenetrable. He could relate. Although the actual problem was her being quite terrible at it. She was explaining the situation and was asking him to come with her to an awards ceremony the following evening. There would be a reception afterward and there she would require his recon and assessment.</p><p>“We are to present a united front, Bucky. No one at home wants to help me put my foot down, but I’m sure you can. I will point out the main offender to you, plus the other two who are just being so clueless.”</p><p>He snorted laughter under his breath  “I remember ‘em.”</p><p>“Good. Keep your eyes peeled during the reception. Particularly on the arrogant one. You’re the man for this fight, Bucky.”</p><p>He smiled. “Least you tell me ahead of time. I don’t know where any of the alleys are in Zana.”</p><p>She cast him a confused look, but he just smiled and shook his head.</p><p>At the visitor center where they had stored their clothes, they changed out of their hiking gear. And as he walked out to where she had called down a hovercraft for him, pushing up his sleeve, he heard her let out a quiet gasp.</p><p>Her eyes were on his arm. In a second she had made the connection. “Your healing is over?” </p><p>She raised her gaze to him, looking amazed. “Why did you not tell me?”</p><p>He pulled the corner of his lip, shrugged.</p><p>“The Women have said you’re finished?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Bucky, congratulations!”</p><p>“Thanks. Guess this means I can expect His Majesty to rescind my invitation to stay any minute now, huh.”</p><p>“That’s not funny. But— why do you seem so subdued about it?”</p><p>“Well, it’s been one hell of a haul. Right now I feel like I could just sleep for a year or two.”</p><p>She still hadn’t moved an inch from her frozen posture. The hovercraft beeped its one-minute alert.</p><p>“Does—” She stared at him. “Does this mean that Captain Rojaz is coming?”</p><p>“Well . . .” He slid his ruck off his shoulder and placed it inside the hovercraft. And when she was clearly waiting, and he was clearly not answering, “Maybe.”</p><p>“What do you mean, maybe? Just tell him that you’re healed. I assume he’s not been back because he wants to give you space for your healing, in which case is very generous of him. But Bucky he’s been waiting eight months. Don’t you think he’s been patient enough?”</p><p>“Yeah, well . . . I guess I’d first have to tell him, right?”</p><p>She blinked. “Tell him what?”</p><p>He cast her another look, somehow now feeling self-conscious about a decision he knew had been in his own best interest.</p><p>Her eyes slightly widened, as she grasped what he’d just said. She leaned forward, just as slightly. “Not possible,” she said, punctuating each word. “He doesn’t <i>know?</i>” </p><p>She clamped her hand over her mouth, wounded eyes on him. Stood there in complete silence, while he laughed a little. The hovercraft, a few feet off the ground and on which she had been leaning, softly beeped again. She turned and smacked it and it immediately fled skyward. He looked on after it, not having known it could be dismissed that way. Also, his hiking kit was in there.</p><p>Now both her hands were over her mouth, one over the other. And he was laughing. She pulled them down, “Bucky, it’s not funny,” she lamented, and replaced them.</p><p>“Princess,” he said softly, taking note of the eyes of campers and other trekkers glancing toward them. “Put your hands down. People are looking worried.”</p><p>She lowered her hands slowly, looked so serious that for a rather sweet moment he saw her generous-hearted mother’s expression on her face. </p><p>“Why?” she asked gently. “Why would you not tell him? He loves you. I can’t imagine what he’s going through, thinking you’re asleep all this time.”</p><p>The hand in his jersey pocket beginning to massage itself of its own accord, he smiled at her. “It’s complicated.”</p><p>She looked away, as if trying to imagine just how complicated adult life could possibly get. Then she looked again at him. Said slowly, “But you said he sends you messages all the time.” He nodded. She slowly shook her head. “Has he never heard of read receipts?”</p><p>He laughed. “Probably not. But I have that turned off. The whole thing is offline.”</p><p>“Oh, Bucky,” she said forlornly. “This is so sad. But . . . now you can tell him you’re okay. He’ll be coming soon now, I imagine.”</p><p>“Well . . . I hope. We’ll see.”</p><p>“What are you waiting for, Bucky?” she cried. “Whatever the issue, I’m sure you can figure it out together.”</p><p>
  <i>You mean the three of us can figure it out together.</i>
</p><p>He looked skyward. “Can you call my hovercraft back? I like that gear.” </p><p>—</p><p>The arrogant one was a strikingly handsome, haughty-faced kid who was receiving an award for having invented something or other that left Shuri expressionlessly bored. He’d been slightly nervous, scoping for anyone else from the Royal Family being present, but aside from her pair of Dora Milaje escorts, it seemed safe enough. He wondered what the hell trouble Steve had gone and made nine months ago.</p><p>At the reception, Shuri had a royal section to herself where her personal guests sat around talking and laughing, a few nodding approvingly at his arm tattoos. </p><p>Everyone appeared to be having a good time, himself included, except Shuri and her love hexagon. Brow pinched and lips compressed, she couldn’t take her eyes off the arrogant one.</p><p>She leaned over and whispered, “What do we do, Bucky?”</p><p>“You want me to go intimidate him?” </p><p>She turned to him, her eyes ablaze. “Would you?”</p><p>“Absolutely.” Frankly, he offended on her behalf. That kid hadn’t so much as acknowledged her presence the whole evening. “I’ll go over there and remind him you’re the princess of an ancient bloodli—”</p><p>“He doesn’t care about that,” she said frantically, looking at him like he had to be kidding. “Love is war. Go over there and threaten him.” Her eyes were back on the kid. “Just rattle him a bit so he’ll come over and try to suck up and I can roll my eyes at him.”</p><p>He frowned at the tactic, wondering whether dames in his day had done things like that. Then smirked, recalling the one guy who never missed the opportunity, who got bored when other people were impressed, and who also been hopeless at seeing what was right in front of him. He shook his head, said to her as he stood up, “You remind me a lot of Steve.”</p><p>Then he stopped, went back and leaned down to her. “This isn’t going to get me into trouble with your family, is it?”</p><p>“Maybe. Possibly. But we’ll deal with that later. Just go.”</p><p>So he went over to where the kid was at someone else’s VIP section, and sat on the arm of the couch. And looking down at the kid, he said in Common Wakandan, “Why are you so disrespectful to Shuri?” </p><p>The kid looked up, looking scared. Stammered, “I’m not afraid of you, White Wolf.”</p><p>“Just answer the question,” he said, burying a sigh.</p><p>After a halting start, the boy went off passionately, and when the kid was done he was still looking at him, gave up and said, “Repeat that. And slowly.” </p><p>So the boy repeated, his dialect not as easy as the common usage, but he caught enough words and meaning to realized that Shuri was being difficult and headstrong and proving impossible to manage. </p><p>“She just does whatever she wants. She does not <i>listen.</i> Gets into all kinds of trouble. And then she wants me to solve all her problems.”</p><p>He killed a further sigh, wondering, once again, how the hell Brooklyn was trying to live again through him.</p><p>He looked at the boy. And said to him, “You’re supposed to be there for her. Be her support. Not constantly irritate her. You know she likes you, and she can’t help who she is. So if you can’t be good to her, just leave her alone.”</p><p>He went back to Shuri, took his seat and picked up his plate of food again, told her, “That boy isn’t right for you. What about the one over there, that your friend. The quiet one. You two have known each other since childhood.”</p><p>Shuri didn’t even bother looking, her nostrils flaring. “That one. He’s so scrawny. And so quiet.”</p><p>Setting aside her own lanky frame, he smiled, his heart contracting hard. “Don’t ever underestimate that type.”</p><p>—</p><p>Late night, reminding her he had a goat herd to tend to in the morning, she first wrinkled her nose before giving him a desperate look as if to say not to leave her with the trouble she’d fully self-created. But he left the rapidly heating up venue. Once the party lights came on, he fully intended to maintain plausible deniability on matters of the royal princess.</p><p>In no particular hurry, he crossed the glowing, glittering, partying boulevard, headed toward the main square of Birnin Zana. A scene like twenty-first century Times Square and Tokyo had an African kid.</p><p>Sighting his tonight fire-red sling, young Wakandans rose or bent precipitously over the sides of their hovercrafts to howl lustily at him, which never failed to crack him up. In his day, dames just batted eyelashes, while guys just made pointed eye contact. </p><p><i>“Sergeant Barnes!”</i> the kids shouted. <i>Babahl! White Wolf!</i> And he sent them their customary thumbs-up. Among his highlight memories of nights out in Zana was once having a crew of young men rapidly descend in their hovercraft and jump out. Dressed handsomely in their rich colors, enough to rival the artistic tapestries in his home, they’d spilled out, pulling out smartphones and begging to get Shuri’s number. He’d never told Shuri, as he was quite sure she would have put him right back into stasis to extract facial recognition data of the young men. Whom in his unofficial capacity as “senior brother,” he’d offered threatening looks instead.</p><p>Wonderland it was. Kids like hyped up futuristic versions from the block, discovering liquor and early adulthood all at once. A time currently all too live in his brain. Him and Steve, drunk on their own liquor sales, literally and figuratively. Their amazement at discovering the hidden places on the very streets and on the same Coney Island of their innocent years. Especially for him. Knowing since childhood that he was attracted to anyone who caught his eye. Boy or girl, didn’t seem to matter, seemed in fact the least relevant part of his attraction. Yet at the same time somehow the most exciting part. So for him, in a time when there was no discussion about people like him, teenage years had been a precarious, if very interesting, time. But he’d had Steve, his beating heart, so he never got lost.</p><p>With his memories properly reconnected, he often laughed remembering Steve being here. It was no surprise at all that Steve had been able to party so easily. Thankfully, however, there was no video of their own times, otherwise Captain America might have a harder time facing the flag with such poise. Though he would have absolutely given his left arm to see Steve in magical glitter body paint.</p><p>Crossing the main square, he glanced up as always at the astonishing central monuments, located at one end of the city’s main boulevard. Shuri had explained that the longevity of Wakanda laid not in ancient citadels or cathedrals as to be found in the Bo’heers she was so fascinated by, since those traditions were based in the reign of central authorities that looked only themselves. Rather, Wakanda survived because unless the Panther protected the people, their magical super-science would face turmoil. Abandoned by the Ancestors who looked out for everyone, not just the chosen bloodline. </p><p>Walking the city center on any given night, he could believe it.</p><p>Now passing, he glanced up once again at the statues of Panthers — the central one as tall as the surrounding skyscrapers. A giant one to represent the current Panther surrounded by a pride of smaller ones to represent the past. He recalled how Shuri would clutch at his arm as they walked past, eyes upward. “Bucky,” she would moan. “I so don’t want to be. I just want to be in my lab and do my work. Brother is more suited for politics. But I fear that one day—” And he’d shake his head, tell her not to worry herself about the future, a thing she couldn’t possibly control.</p><p>Now he heard not Shuri’s voice, but this one kid from Brooklyn’s.</p><p>
  <i>What am’a lookin’ at, Buck?</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The future, Steve.</i>
</p><p>Across the boulevard, as he approached, a set of guys spotted him, stood up and waited. The bouncers from the now famous club he and Captain American had spent a night together now nearly nine months ago now.</p><p>The bouncers invariably hailed him whenever he came by, their night out having graced their LED fliers for months and no doubt boosting traffic — and he’d guess also scoring them a ton of action. </p><p>Tonight was no different. Receiving him like a passing general, they pulled him into their midst as usual. He answered greetings, offered greetings of his own. “How the visits to the River sides?” — a polite way of asking how his healing was going. Nodding to indicate that all was good, he felt he could say more by just extending his hand for handshakes, and did just that.</p><p>Of the set of them, only one noticed what he had done. That he had been the one to initiate handshakes when he had long since developed a reputation for having a general aversion of skin to skin touch. The continued discomfort which seemed Hydra’s parting gift, although Shuri continually assured him it was psychological. </p><p>When it was that bouncer’s turn, taller and bigger than even him or Steve, the bouncer first glanced in surprise at the hand that used to stay tucked in his jacket or sling, and taking it, tilted his head at his arm. Apparently having glimpsed the art beneath his sleeve. The bouncer then met his gaze, an interested pinch in his brow.</p><p>“You’re okay, Babahl?”</p><p>It was a general greeting, but it could also serve as something more specific as the occasion called. This occasion called.</p><p>“Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay.” </p><p>After another look, the bouncer simply fished into his side — they put pockets on the sides — and withdrew a flat, luminescent card, which he handed over. </p><p>He took it, curiously.</p><p>“You used to be a boxer.”</p><p>He sent the bouncer a look of surprise. The bouncer nodded sagely. “Are you still interested? In flexing your muscles without . . . eh . . . killing anyone.”</p><p>The other bouncers immediately jumped off their stools, fists up, and took up fighting stances. “For Wakanda!” one of them cried.</p><p>He chuckled. “Always,” he said to the bouncer.</p><p>His bouncer nodded. Indicated the card. “Call me any time. We’ll relieve some of your tension.”</p><p>He sent the guy a look. Whose card said his name was Weshi.</p><p>Slipping the card into his jacket, he nodded his thanks at them, before continuing toward a bank of waiting hovercrafts.</p><p>—</p><p>Mom and pops were in with the old mister at not at his front step when he got home. Maybe they’d decided to abandon him to his fate.</p><p>Settling into his own bed later, he laid staring out at the starry night.</p><p>Tonight he was thinking of Sarah.</p><p>He missed her terribly. Maybe even more than his missed his own parents. Because she had been all alone and racked with guilt. And his ma and pa had been pretty happy together while their kid, like all kids in their day, was running around just as happily growing up outdoors and in the streets. In those days, the Irish were considered the dregs of society, just a tier above Blacks, by the Anglo Saxon facing majority, and Sarah Rogers and her kind were faced with all kinds of prejudice once their accents were heard in the general store. Steve had been more interested in getting into it with any and all perpetrators than being able to go home and simply be there for his ma in the way she truly needed. Well, that had been more than all right. That had been his job. </p><p>He remembered hugging and kissing Sarah Rogers more times than he had hugged his own ma, who half the time was busy getting groped his by his randy old pa, whose own parents had been Italian and English so had had no chance of not turning out that way. So there they all were, in that steaming melting pot of early twentieth century New York, and Sarah had been all alone with her wild, sickly son. And he’d only been too happy to be her support, whatever she needed.</p><p>What a privilege it would have been to have gotten to take care of her. If she could have lived to see this future in which her son was probably the healthiest person on the planet, had become a worldwide hero of an even larger world war than the one which had taken Joe, medical miracles as the norm, and domestic life so easy it was like magic. Freed of all her burdens, he could easily see her spending time in the countryside, making friends with the neighbors and enjoying trying out new recipes from that condescending AI. </p><p>It remained deeply important to him to do right by her, even as he wished, at last, to claim her son for himself. And here in the twenty-first century, he would have gone on his knees to her and explained just why he was there to take Steve for himself, and begged her to accept him for who he was.</p><p>As with his original plans for him and Steve after the war, he would have done it because for him it wouldn’t have been a matter of choice. They were family — him, Steve and Sarah. And they always would be.</p><p>Sighing, he closed his wet eyes. What the hell was he doing thinking about things that really didn’t matter any more. When all he was supposed to be waiting on was a letter from Steve so he could finally tell him he was awake.</p><p>Well, whatever from dreamworld had caused all of this, he could at least report to himself that he’d respected the compulsion to face it. Admit to his own feelings. It was what it was. Something had slipped free, and as recommended, he had let it finish its course. And if he had lived with it once, well, he could learn to live with it again.</p><p><i>G’night, Steve,</i> he thought as sleep came, sparing him from losing his composure again. <i>I’ll always be right here.</i></p><p>Sleep came oddly heavily — slowly dimming the deep colors of his bedroom until it seemed like the room itself went away.</p><p>—</p><p>He was in Steve’s bedroom listening to Steve coughing. Worried out of his mind. Got up to fix Steve a bowl of chicken soup. Now in the kitchen wishing and praying to God, if God existed, to make Steve whole. Going over the usual lists of things he would happily exchange for an answer. Then, fixings in hand, returning to Steve’s bedroom. </p><p>“How’re you feeling, Steve,” — and he stopped in the doorway.</p><p>There was a man, of incredible physical beauty, lying where he had left Steve. Apparently naked under the sheets which were carelessly pulled up around his hips, the stranger, bearing Steve’s eyes and Steve’s smile, was smiling sexily at him.</p><p>“Perfect, actually,” Steve answered, his smile radiant. A naked arm went up over his head, tucking itself behind the pillow. “Got the soup? Well then get in here. And don’t forget the books. Or yourself.”</p><p>He spilled the soup all over himself. </p><p>And woke up.</p><p>Yellow dawn light greeted him. Lying on his side, he stared at the solid wood wall meters away. What the fuck?</p><p>— </p><p>By late afternoon his thoughts were only just recovering and his heart was still pounding. That had been— bizarre went without saying, but that been on a whole other level of erotic. Nothing formless about it, but as solid as concrete. Like he could have rolled over and felt Steve in his bed. That type of dream might actually kill him in his sleep, not merely shove him to the floor.</p><p>Neither had it felt like a dream. More like a melding of the past and . . . a future.</p><p>And it had not been . . . the most comforting dream he could have had.</p><p>All day at the woodshed, he was hardly sure of what he was doing. Yet was hardly aware when night came.</p><p>Just seemed that soon he was getting ready for bed, nervous as hell.</p><p>Seated on the edge of his bed, he stared at the luminescent art on his arm. Wasn’t this actually the dust from the Wariza’s fungi? The kids had inadvertently painted him with magic. Had to be. He was so fucked in this place. How could a life so perfect be filled with such craziness. So he was gonna fall asleep now, and probably for days, if not weeks, and get these shocks to his heart as morning wake up alarms. His sweet-smelling dreams of Brooklyn now turned against him. Fuck’s sake, if he was going to be dreaming of being with Steve, why couldn’t it just be one or the other version? That was something a normal mind could deal with. It was bad enough he couldn’t actually get with Steve in the way he wanted in his dreams. Now fucking this.</p><p>Sighing, he stood up and entered his living room, picking up the comm dome without a word and returning to bed. Where, depositing it, he selected a random set of messages from a few weeks back and tapped play.</p><p>“Hiya, Buck. I swear to ya, sum’n’s goin’ on. I can’t put ma’ finger on it, but this alien tech stuff . . . it ain’t gettin’ less. And Nick Fury, he’s a good guy, but he’s a spy by nature, you know? It’s like yer callin’ Dick Tracy, but you don’t know what yer gettin’.” Steve paused, pushed out a breath. “Ah, I shouldn’t complain. Me, Sam and Natasha would be sweatin’ for where to house all this contraband if it weren’t for Nick. But I tell ya, Buck, nuthin’ feels right . . .”</p><p>Sleep came in exactly the manner as the night before.</p><p>Now he was in Sarah’s kitchen. Steve seated on the stool, him on the stool facing Steve, Sarah thankfully at work. Him looking through her kit, which was massive because of her son, ragging on Steve who was beaten red-black-and-blue. Steve’s chest practically caving from all the hacking.</p><p>“Take your shirt off,” he instructed, and Steve took hold of the hem of his T-shirt and stripped it off, and before him sat the most beautiful man he had ever seen. Possessed of a large, healthy, glowing body. </p><p>Steve tipped his head and smiled at him. “What else you want me to take off, huh Buck?” And reached for him. </p><p>He jerked and fell off the stool, hitting the floor with a loud crack. </p><p>And woke up.</p><p>Golden morning light shined on him. Assuring him he’d slept right through dawn.</p><p>Slowly, he pushed aside his bedclothes and sat up. He took a breath, burying his hand in his hair, at this point not even bothering with heaping abuse on his psyche. Just got up with a sigh.</p><p>The pen soon watered and fed, old mister-goat still tiredly hanging in there, he kept his kitchen door wide open to let Brooklyn and Dodger know all was forgiven and that they were invited over for breakfast. The pair quietly trotted into the kitchen together, stopping in the middle of the floor, from where they stood waiting for their apology. Staring with looks that communicated quite clearly that they were worried about just how smart a person he was after all. Whether they hadn’t tried to stop him every step of the way to losing himself to a time long gone and a love permanently altered.</p><p>Opening the compost bin, he sent them a look.</p><p>“Yes,” he told them. “You two did say. But then you’ve never met the guy.” He turned back to the compost bin. “Either of ‘em.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>≈≈</p>
</div>“Babahl,” said his immediate next door neighbor, Wanjiku, whom everyone called Jiki, speaking to him in Common Wakandan. One of the mothers he had long since dubbed the neighborhood aunts. “We notice you’re making window canopies. Against the coming rains?”<p>Seated on the other side of his switched off lathe, he glanced up and nodded at her. “Really looking forward to it.”</p><p>“To the short rains?”</p><p>He nodded. He’d heard and read all about the season. Temperate, cool, short pitter-patters, and soft downpours that lasted for hours and soothed the mood of the entire country. It seemed almost made up. Shuri had assured him it wasn’t, that even the animals loved it, using it as their preferred mating season.</p><p>“It is a beautiful time,” Jiki confirmed. “Everything flourishes.”</p><p>Then she eyed him, in that way mothers randomly did when they knew you were up to something. But he wasn’t up to anything. So he just sat there, trying not to look inexplicably guilty.</p><p>“It will be particularly special for you, now that you have been cleared as healed.”</p><p>Staring at her, standing in the clearing on the side of the lathes, he wasn’t sure what facial expression to maintain. This was definitely going somewhere.</p><p>Jiki then started advising on just how to place the canopies, what colors best caught the sunrise and sunset during the rains, as apparently under the Dome, those were pretty special, and how a particular alloy of vibranium could actually catch and dampen all sound between the downpours.</p><p>“It’s an alloy that can even be made to appear as natural wood,” she said lightly. “It’s what we all use.”</p><p>It was this last recommendation that had him watching her closely. And by the time she finished, she was struggling with her smile.</p><p>He knew what she was getting at.</p><p>Delicately, he said, “Do you mean for when I have . . . a visitor?”</p><p>She beamed at him. Then she waggled her eyebrows. </p><p>“Mating season,” she whispered, dramatically. Then with a pert wave, simply turned and went on her way.</p><p>He looked on after her, wondering whether he had just imagined their exchange.</p><p>—</p><p>“Babahl,” said the young goat-leather buyer, slyly, eyeing him.</p><p>Same guy with whom he’d nearly electrocuted himself a couple months back grazing fingers. The one who looked vaguely like a twenty-year-old East African Steve, with his big cat eyes, full lips and oversized nose. The one with the knowing, smug smirk.</p><p>It was mid-afternoon and he was only now grabbing lunch. And concluding the business of where mister-goat would be passing to when it was all over.</p><p>Whereas the guy, whose name was Kise, on his regular rounds of purchases in the outlying communities, had hardly shifted his eyes from his victory art ever since entering his kitchen.</p><p>“How much did you say?”</p><p>He couldn’t remember. It was custom to give a regular customer a discount, but this kid irked him somehow. Well, not somehow. The guy had been the one to keep it real by telling him his erotic dreams were just that, and not any deep spiritual messages from the Ancestors or something. Although, turned out one of his dreams of <i>Elileh</i> had in fact been a message from Steve, so showed how this guy knew.</p><p>“Or are you giving me for free?” Kise said.</p><p>“I’m not giving you for free.”</p><p>Kise smiled. “Than how much?”</p><p>He told him. And head bent to his pad, Kise effected the bank transfer. “Has Ilams of the River sides come to see you since?” Kise asked. He didn’t answer. She’d been the one to confuse him over his dreams to begin with. She came as regularly as he did, buying goat’s milk from them, and this guy knew that. Although unlike Kise, the broad was as free-spited as they came and hardly ever remembered what she had talked about previously. Thankfully for him. His reticence in answering didn’t deter.</p><p>“She’s terrible. A really inconsiderate person,” Kise said.</p><p>Kise completed the transfer, then pocketed his pad. On the counter between them, his own pad chimed a confirmation.</p><p>Kise then returned his gaze to his arm, before raising silent, inquisitor eyes at him.</p><p>“How’s it been?”</p><p>Finishing a mug of tea, he spared the young leather buyer a glance. Wondering what the angle was with this guy.</p><p>“I’m good,” he said. “I’m better.”</p><p>“You appear so.”</p><p>“Yeah?” he said dismissively, looking out his kitchen window.</p><p>“Yes, Babahl. Very much yes.”</p><p>And when he looked at Kise, the leather buyer, very casually, once more sent a glance at his arm.</p><p>“It appears that victory is yours,” Kise said. “<i>Nua.</i>”</p><p>
  <i>Congratulations.</i>
</p><p>“Thanks.”</p><p>Then Kise said, “How is Captain Steve Rojaz?”</p><p>Unable to mask that he was caught off guard, he sent the kid a look.</p><p>Kise smiled. “Everyone knows the story of you and Captain America. Friends from childhood, separated by war, reunited by magic. A warriors’ tale. And for some of us, an even more beautiful story awaiting a conclusion.”</p><p>He went on staring at Kise. As with Jiki, something was up here. But unlike with Jiki, he could smell a salesman when he saw one.</p><p>“Now that you’re feeling better,” Kise continued. “Perhaps you intend to invite him back? In which case I have a number of items that would make his visit a very pleasant one. As pleasant as your most pleasant dream. Indeed, much more, as I think we can all agree the real thing is always better than any dream.”</p><p>Finished, Kise waited.</p><p>Which had him glancing at the big leather wares-box sitting on his kitchen table. In total spite of himself, now wondering what the fuck was inside.</p><p>“What’d you mean by pleasant?” he asked. “Gifts or something?”</p><p>Kise smirked. “No, Babahl. We are not children. I don’t believe that Steve Rojaz is coming back so that you can give him small Wakandan flags, miniature warriors, and keychains.”</p><p>“First of all, I never told you he’s coming back. So— tell me what you mean, and then . . . you gotta go. I’m sorry, I have things to get to.”</p><p>Lifting both hands to signal understanding, Kise moved to the leather box and turned back its flaps.</p><p>“You outsiders call these things aphrodisiacs,” Kise said, extracting small leather pouches and sounding disconcertingly more serious than he had ever heard. “But there are many ways to think of them. And they can do so many things, depending on whatever mood you find yourself, or yourselves.”</p><p>He stared at Kise, who at his utter silence had looked over at him. Him with his tea suspended halfway to his lips. Thank God he hadn’t been sipping, or he’d have spurted a mouthful by now.</p><p>“I will explain their uses in detail to you now, if you so wish.”</p><p>He lowered the mug to the counter.</p><p>“No, you won’t,” he said flatly, in tones he hoped conveyed clear understanding. “What you’ll do is pack that up and not do this again.”</p><p>Kise only smiled, lifting both hands. “<i>Ko bo’loghi,</i> Babahl.” <i>No problem, White Wolf.</i></p><p>The young leather buyer packed up his clearly bullshit snakeskin oil wares, and with a frustratingly charming smile, exited his kitchen. Actually stunned, he watched through the window as the guy descended southward into the neighborhood, glowing anti-grav wagon trailing behind him.</p><p>For fuck’s sake . . . </p><p>— </p><p>Calling it quits for the day not much long after, he was at least able to see some progress on his project.</p><p>He’d asked Jiki to show him that alloy, and she’d explained to him what the compositions were and did. Wakandans knew about vibranium like other people knew what kind of milk to buy at the store.</p><p>But as the sun descended behind the forest outline, he dropped his tools, only then aware of how hard he had been pushing his mind not to think. To the northeast, toward Zana, the sky, augmented by the Dome, was about to take on the arresting colors of the shield with the star. A sight which unless he wasn’t home, he would always sit and watch. More so now that he wanted him like a hot brand on his skin. And dreams of bygone days could be handled as they came up. Steve needn’t know. Nine months ago, Steve had done everything for him. And if it was merely that he was having some kind of lapse at this last minute, he’d happily shove it aside. It was no big deal ultimately, and no doubt it would pass with time.</p><p>And mom and pops lounged forgivingly against him, he sat on his front stoop, leaned against his closed front door, and waited the sunset to begin. Brooklyn, pops, the softer hearted of the two, settled down and fused into his side under his sling. Dodger laid her head on his thigh and said nothing at all. </p><p>And he sat there waiting for the light show in the sky. Like he was on a pier at Coney Island chowing down on roast beef from Nathan’s.</p><p>
  <i>Watcha got there, Buck?</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Nuthin’ you wanna try.</i>
</p><p><i>Hand it ova’,</i> he heard in that sing song tone, like a school teacher confiscating contraband. And he wouldn’t, just so he would feel his bony knee on his back while Steve tried to wrestle the sandwich from him. Just so he could feel his body all over him. Steve who at twenty-one had all the physical strength of a ten year old.</p><p>Had an astonishingly high tolerance for drink though, he had to say. Health apparently not withstanding.</p><p>He sighed. Life, magic, whatever this in-between part of the cycle, was putting him through the wringer.</p><p>Once the glowing sky dimmed, the sun dipped and the colors of the world changed, he slowly stood up, petting both sentinels, and went to get them a treat bowl.</p><p>Then he returned inside. First to see whether there was anything going on in Zana he wanted to check out, or just go to bed early, then to check his messages. </p><p>There was one from Steve. Last had been about a follow-up mission on the big scientist factory raid, and the reverse alien tech thing that was bothering Steve so much. There hadn’t been one for a few days. Not unusual considering an ongoing mission. He’d probably get the full story now. More of that, he presumed, until Steve chose to tell him what had happened three weeks ago to have him stammering on that message as he had.  Meantime, it was tap play on mission reports.</p><p>Which he did. All but hearing the standard opener, <i>Hiya, Buck.</i></p><p>Instead there was heavy silence.</p><p>He pulled back, stared at the dome.</p><p>The timer counted down seconds. Then Steve’s voice issued from it. No greeting. No stammering. No air of hesitation whatsoever. But slow paced, and as heavy in tone as he had ever heard.</p><p>“I read your letters from the War.”</p><p>Silence.</p><p>“Who knew you were so literary.”</p><p>Then a pause. But not a long one. Then came the rest of it.</p><p>Not until the hazel glow of the communicator dimmed to a dark-wood brown did he realize he’d taken up sitting on the floor.</p><p>“These are my letters to you, Bucky,” Steve finished, with so much emotion he could feel it. “Please wake up and read them.”</p><p>Not until the sound of Brooklyn and Dodger scraping at their now empty wooden bowl broke into his thoughts did he come back down to Earth.</p><p>He slowly got up, went and stood over the communicator. And stared at it for so long that . . . all he could do . . . was . . . tap to play the message again.</p><p>
  <i>Never told you how your falling into that ravine affected me. . . .  Never told you a damned thing.  . . . These are my letters to you . . . </i>
</p><p>Without another thought, he turned for the front door, startling the life out of his goats, and scaled the side of his home in a couple steps, soaring for the first hovercraft that descended within reach.</p><p>Luma had better know he was coming. She’d said to wait for when Steve wrote him a letter. So she had to know.</p><p>—</p><p>She did know.</p><p>Soaked from the swim but already drying in the vast golden warmth, he entered the Entrance Cavern in a hyper focused state. So much so that as delighted calls of welcome reached him from all around, in solos and chorus, he was momentarily taken aback. Then slowed his pace, finding he was quite the same way to see them too, having been away for over two weeks. Ever since Luma’s instruction to wait for Steve’s letter. And maybe he was even more affected than them, because according  to everything that was happening, his time with them was coming to a close.</p><p>Seeing his excitement nonetheless, the Women waved him along — not toward the wall rock that had been his spiritual home for nearly nine months now, due east of the Cavern’s entry, but rather straight ahead. Toward the interior spaces. In his excitement he didn’t catch that. Instead he picked up the pace until he found her. </p><p>Right at the entrance to the enormous mouth of the tunnel burrowing into the mountain, she was busy tending fungi. She looked happy and healthy, her mass of silver whorls hiked high on her crown, big chunks falling down her back and shoulders.</p><p>“Bucky,” she said, with no input whatsoever from him. “Here you are.”</p><p>Ohh, was he excited. And she could feel it. The rock floor itself was probably vibrating. Reaching out as he approached, she first took his arm, then placed a hand to his chest, calming him.  Or trying to.</p><p>“Congratulations,” she said serenely. “I’m thrilled for you.”</p><p>Next, she set her hand on his arm, but instead of letting him lead, as was usual when they walked, she began leading. Not back toward the Entrance Cavern, but toward the interior, deeper into the massive tunnel. Into sections of the mountain he had never been.</p><p>“I wanna call him,” he said, practically babbling. “Right now. I wanna tell him I’m awake. You said I could.”</p><p>“Okay,” she said.</p><p>Even in his disorganized state, he caught and didn’t like her unenthusiastic response.</p><p>But he was distracted because he had become aware of his surroundings and realized she was walking him deep into the mountain. Into lower levels, it felt, somehow. </p><p>He looked around him. The tunnel was so massive that as with the Entrance Cavern, the ceiling was all but lost upward in the moss created sunlight. And branching off , there were other, equally enormous tunnels. While along theirs, openings like the, mouths of caves, sat like train station terminals along the way.</p><p>“Hadn’t you said these parts of the Caverns hold powerful magic?” he asked distractedly, not sure where to put his gaze. “Things to do with the subconscious?”</p><p>“Yup.”</p><p>And as she spoke they passed a Cavern which he had to slow down to believe what he was seeing. His attention was gone from her. Through the entrance, he could see into the Cavern as though looking out onto a landscape. The largest place he had ever seen, bar none.</p><p>It seemed an entire world of golden grassland. Colossal shafts of sunlight hit the landscape all over through a layer of warm white clouds. And he meant colossal. Big enough to encompass entire cities. But that wasn’t the stunner. Unless he was finally losing it, there appeared to be a tree so enormous it didn’t to fit the world itself. Only its trunk visible across the horizon, its branches and roots as if holding up other worlds entirely.</p><p>“What is this place?” he asked in a hushed voice.</p><p>Arm on his, she kept moving, taking him with her. “It has many names. But there is where we call Onineh, the Interior.”</p><p>“That’s it, isn’t it,” he said, recognizing the name he’d thrown about without having a clue.. “What’s if for, exactly?”</p><p>“When you find yourself there, you will know.”</p><p>She had walked them down a branch off the tunnel. And it terminated onto a rock ledge, leaving them standing now on a rock outcropping. Much to his surprise, beneath which the Waters swirled. Causing him slight confusion since they were still inside the mountain ziggurat, while the Waters were definitely outside, a good walking distance away. Plus he was sure they were below ground level. But perhaps this was a tributary of a river which fed the lake.</p><p>Waters at which he looked down, drawn somehow, in spite of the hot emotions threatening to cook him where he stood.</p><p>“You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” he said to her, eyes still on the Waters, which seemed . . . as warm, somehow, as he felt. As if the Waters were making him hot. Or . . . <i>he</i> was making the Waters hot? Currents of earth-jewel colors flowed, glittering with gold dust, churning long and smooth, eternally onward. Now it felt . . . </p><p>He stared for a while, knowing of course that nothing in this place was his mundane, Brooklynite imagination. </p><p>Their dimmed, subterranean world had always felt weirdly stimulating to his brain, especially on the Shores.<br/>
But now those Waters looked outright . . . more than just stimulating.</p><p>Aware that she hadn’t answered his query, he turned back to her, looked down at her small frame.</p><p>“You didn’t answer me,” he told her. “You said to wait for when he writes a letter. I’m not sure what I expected, a piece of mail or something, but he actually said he was sending letters. So why aren’t you excited?”</p><p>“I’m not merely excited, Bucky. I told you, I’m thrilled.”</p><p>“So— I can call him, right?”</p><p>“Do you feel ready?”</p><p>“Yes, of course.”</p><p>“Are you sure?”</p><p>“<i>Yes,</i> I—”</p><p>He had stopped talking because from his left, along the rock ledge, Steve was walking toward them.</p><p>Before the serum, as he had known him all his life.</p><p>Stripped down to swim trunks and now toeing off his leather oxfords and kicking them aside. </p><p>“Hiya, Buck,” and . . . now it was Coney Island — the Waters still swirling beneath them but around him a mirage coming into place. </p><p>Stock still, he was taking it all in around eyes pinned on Steve. “Ya comin’?” and without breaking stride, Steve leapt into the Waters.</p><p>He blinked. Completely blanked.</p><p>He turned to Luma.</p><p>“Better catch him,” she said.</p><p>He didn’t need to be told twice — freeing himself from her hold, he turned and dove head-first into the Waters.</p><p>Instead of multicolored water, he found himself beneath a green lake. Swaying water plants, shifting sand floor.</p><p>It took only him a second to recognize his surroundings.</p><p>It was the lake outside of Lisbon, where Steve had stayed underwater and waved at him like a merman. </p><p>Except that gold dust glittered faintly all around. </p><p>His heart had stopped. Shocked, he glanced up at the surface, expecting to see Gabe and Dugan and Pinky. To see a trail of coins streaking across his vision as his fellow unit commandos tossed coins in after him, laughing themselves to tears when he alone among them — knowing and loving Steve Rogers, a terror they couldn’t imagine — had foolishly dived in, with a mindset of rescuing Captain America. </p><p>But up above was still the hazy outline of the rock ledge. Twisting around, he searched the waters frantically — until he saw him.</p><p>Not Steve . . . but Steve. </p><p>His Steve transformed.</p><p>Effortlessly holding his place underwater, Steve was smiling. Wriggling his fingers at him.</p><p>
  <i>You’re dreaming, Bucky, you’re asleep in your bed and having another lucid dream . . . you’ll choke on lake water and wake up in a second . . . </i>
</p><p>But he kicked off after him. And Steve turned and swam away, then simply vanished before his eyes. Startled, he rotated his arm to a stop. And floated there. Underneath a lake he knew could not be in.</p><p>He kept floating, waiting, hoping for Steve to reappear. Then he began swimming, this way and that, searching the lake’s environs, that maybe Steve might be around a waving water shrub, smiling and pulling him in.</p><p>When he was tired of fooling himself, he swam upward.</p><p>Dragging himself onshore, it wasn’t to a pier in Lisbon. Or onto a rock ledge above the Waters, with a tunnel extending beyond. </p><p>Instead he had come up onto the glittering milk sands of the Shores. The mountains of the ziggurats in the near distance, the Forest all around. </p><p>At whose treeline Luma sat tending fungi.</p><p>Dragging himself into a sitting position, frankly, the transition didn’t even faze him. Maybe even up to a few minutes ago, but not anymore. Now it was just another day in magicland.</p><p>“How’d it go?” she asked.</p><p>Arm on his knee, soaked to his back teeth, and just as shocked, he sat staring at the smoothly swirling Waters. And answered with all he could think to say.</p><p>“He— he swam away.”</p><p>“Huhn.”</p><p>In the continued silence, his own thoughts still a giant blank, he turned and looked at her. Kneeling at the fungi, she looked a little more serious than he had ever seen.</p><p>“Better luck next time,” she said. Then, like a creaking old piece of furniture, she straightened. “Be right back.”</p><p>Wordlessly, he watched her cross the sand, headed toward the ziggurat. “Ma’am,” he called.</p><p>“Stay here, Bucky.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>≈≈</p>
</div>He stayed, and paced, knowing fully well she’d left him there to think for himself instead of ply her with questions. But how could anyone possibly figure out something like this?<p>She returned. </p><p>“What?” he said shakily to her. “What just happened?”</p><p>“Don’t you know?”</p><p>“H-ow would I know? Right now I can’t even breathe.”</p><p>She said, “Look around you, Bucky. And consider where we are.”</p><p>He did. Turning to look at the Shores, the Forest and the mountain ziggurats beyond, when they had just been inside the mountains — a geography which had shifted while he’d been underwater. These lands which, no matter how magical, were as immutable as anywhere else, yet suddenly everything had shifted. And she had brought him through the places they said were for the subconscious. </p><p>“We’re — we’re in a subconscious place.”</p><p>“We’re in yours.”</p><p>He brought his gaze back to her. She said, “Bucky, now listen carefully to me.” </p><p>But his mind had flown. “He— he’s here because of me?”</p><p>“This is where he exists inside you,” she confirmed.</p><p>His thoughts stopped completely. He stared unseeing at her for a long time. Then he looked around again. “I can see him here any time. That’s what you’re telling me.”</p><p>“Bucky,” she said gravely, seeing clearly the look in his eyes. “This place is your subconscious, therefore has hold over you which you cannot imagine. Here exists magic so immense and powerful as to be unknowable. Here you must be very careful.”</p><p>But she was talking to herself. Steve wasn’t dangerous. Steve was lovely. And here waiting for him.</p><p>“How do I get back? How do I see him again.”</p><p>“He’s here. But Bucky, listen to me. He’s also speaking to you now. So now you must go home and listen to him. For this last stage, you must listen to him.”</p><p>“I don’t wanna go home. He’s my home. I’ll go home and talk to him later.” And he could hear himself and the nonsensical way it sounded, but he didn’t care, because this <i>was</i> crazy.</p><p>And this had to be happening for a reason. If this was the last stage then maybe it was a final parting gift from— the gods of magic or something. He had ancestors too. Maybe they were in those Waters looking out for him.</p><p>“Bucky,” she said kindly. “You must be very careful here. Don’t lose yourself here.”</p><p>“Then <i>why</i> am I here? I thought you said I was <i>healed,</i>” he said, his voice rising helplessly. And he could hear himself and he sounded like Bucky from Brooklyn but he didn’t care. “I thought I was gonna come here and tell you Steve wrote me a letter and I was gonna fucking get married now. You have any <i>idea</i> what he means to me? What it feels like to come in here and see him?” Abruptly stopping, he swallowed the crack in his voice. “So why am I here if I’m healed?”</p><p>She sighed, looking saddened. Then slowly, she came over, arm outstretched. Reaching him, her hand touched his chest, then his residual limb. And she moved over and slipped her arm around his waist. She gave him a gentle squeeze. And began slowly moving him. He went.</p><p>“Here is to show your deepest thoughts, by which you may shed any last holdouts. Because we understand that not all can be spoken even by those most desperate for healing. That’s just how the human mind works. You are healed, Bucky. And there is no greater proof than the fact that you are here. As only the healed can enter here. Otherwise many things would have attacked you in this place. Including the Assassin.”</p><p>“He’s gone,” he said immediately. “I’m not afraid of him anymore.” And he was surprised to hear the words he hadn’t known were inside him. “I know what he is, and he has nothing to do with me.”</p><p>She nodded, patting then rubbing his arm approvingly. </p><p>It made him aware that they were no longer at the Shores but back inside the tunnels. Complete with the psychological feeling that they had left lower levels, and with the sight of the Entrance Cavern — and belatedly he suddenly understood why it was called that — at the far end glowing like a small sun.</p><p>“You have a memory inside you that is adrift. A whole portion of your life that has no anchor. I would have preferred that you not find yourself here, Bucky, but here we are. And better now than later. Even better that he’s speaking to you. So go home now and listen to him. And as with your previous stages to healing, we will see this through.”</p><p>—</p><p>Before dawn he was in a hovercraft returning to the Waters. The Wariza had colorful cottages all over their lands, which were to be seen by standing on the ziggurats and looking away from the Forest toward the valleys and plains. But plenty of them seemed perfectly content to sleep inside the ziggurats themselves. So, often when he arrived early, he would find them wandering out of all kinds of nooks and crannies, yawning and stretching and pulling their robes more tightly around themselves. </p><p>As with that morning. The warmth of the Waters evaporating off his neck as he entered the Cavern, he was received only with yawns this time as the Women watched him head directly toward the tunnels. He didn’t ask for Luma and no one offered up her whereabouts.</p><p>Inside the expansive tunnel, he walked up a distance, passing the cave-mouth train station terminals, alone in the vast golden sunlight. This time, without having to reach near the Interior when he saw Steve walking up ahead.</p><p>His breathing cutting off, he picked up the pace and was soon was next to him.</p><p>As soon as they met up, they were in their neighborhood.</p><p>Instead of rock and colorful moss and fungi on the floor and walls, it was brownstones and a leafy avenue. It was people and cars, although sounds seemed faint. They were in their backyards. Steve was crossing the community gardens, passing the yard that was directly opposite Sarah’s, headed for his own. </p><p>At which Steve stopped and looked up at his parents’ floor. “Bucky!”</p><p>“I’m right here, Steve,” he said, no idea how he got the words out. He couldn’t blink, couldn’t take his eyes off him. Steve turned and looked at him, then resumed walking. He followed.</p><p>“How are ya?” he asked him, somehow, around his stinging eyes and constricting throat.</p><p>It was Steve, through and through. About age twenty. His hair, his eyes, his face, his body, his clothes, everything. </p><p>“Not bad,” Steve said, turning to cast him a very sweet, very accommodating smile. And then said nothing more.<br/>
Shoved his hands in his pockets and kept walking. </p><p>And he realized, of course it wasn’t Steve, he hadn’t pulled Steve bodily out of the past or Brooklyn. It was an embodiment of Steve as he carried him in his heart. </p><p>And after a few paces, he also realized, a Steve who was waiting for him to say why he had brought him here. Because Steve was here to help him through this.</p><p>And somehow finding the will, because he had spent his life wanting to, he heard himself say hoarsely, “Can I buy you an ice cream cone?”</p><p>Steve smiled at him. “Are you asking me out on a date, Bucky Barnes?”</p><p>He nodded hard, swallowing the lump in his throat.</p><p>“All right,” Steve said. “But I like a lott’a ice cream, so I hope you saved ya mad money.”</p><p>And there they were at Coney Island. It was like being inside a live painting, but in which only he and Steve interacted. Their environs like props — the colors lush, the sounds, the scents — everything like in his memories; real to his imagination, but not interactive. They were seated on a bench by the water, the steamboats in the background, couples walking with heads bent close. It was sunset on the peninsula. There was a breeze wafting through. The distant clang of the Fourth Avenue subway rendering even more timelessness to the scene. It wasn’t until he handed Steve the ice cream cone with his left hand that he realized he was the same age as Steve. </p><p>“Thanks,” Steve said.</p><p>His gaze followed his every movement. “How are ya today?”</p><p>Steve laughed, eating his ice cream. “Buck, you already asked me that.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he breathed. </p><p>And Steve himself wasn’t quite Steve. Just . . . the essence of Steve. A core personality without the life experiences. Or even agency. Merely a version of Steve he could speak directly to, from his own deepest self, even if this Steve couldn’t voice anything real from Steve. </p><p>But he had him. He had him right there. As real and as three dimensional as himself. </p><p>The edges of the live painting they were in seemed to be scorching at its edges, his mind realizing what it had.</p><p>Steve went on eating his ice cream. Then glanced at him. “You always stare atcha dates like this?”</p><p>“Just you,” he said hoarsely. He didn’t even know where his own ice cream cone was. In his right hand, he supposed, feeling it dripping down the hand at the end of the arm he had draped along the back of the bench. Unable to breathe, to even blink, he slowly shifted himself closer on the bench, tense with self-control, until he was right up against Steve’s body. Closer than he had ever managed under such circumstances in real life. He was so close it was just the two of them in the world, and Steve no longer ate the ice cream but had turned toward him. As close as he was, Steve’s gaze could have only been somewhere around his jaw. Watching it happen, he placed a hand on Steve’s arm, closing around it. It was warm and real. He could feel Steve’s pulse tripping on the pads of his fingers. Heard his own breathing. Steve didn’t move. Only waited.</p><p>“Steve,” he breathed.</p><p>“Yeh, Buck.”</p><p>And feeling completely out of his body, he lowered his head and brought his mouth to Steve’s.</p><p>Steve turned away.</p><p>He froze, in shock.</p><p>Steve stayed turned away. And staring at Steve’s jaw, he couldn’t make his mind work.</p><p>Suddenly a great roar filled his ears, and before he knew what was happening the world dissolved in a great splash of water.</p><p>Before he knew it they were under the green lake again. Him rotating his arm and trying to stabilize.</p><p>And when the flurry of bubbles cleared, Steve — post-serum — was a distance away, floating effortlessly, waving his fingers at him. Then turned and was gone.</p><p>He swam after him, looking around, but it was no use. </p><p>Swimming to the surface, he pulled himself onto the Shores and collapsed onto his side. Winded in a way he would never be in real life, when due to the Super Soldier serum he had the lung capacity of a dolphin. </p><p>But he couldn’t catch his breath. His heart was pounding as when his mind was being prepped for a hard wipe. </p><p>He laid there panting softly. </p><p>A short distance away, at the treeline of the Forest, Luma was tending fungi.</p><p>“I see you heard every word I said,” she said dryly.</p><p>What had just happened? Had Steve turned away when he’d tried to kiss him? Or had that been his imagination? But this <i>was</i> his imagination.</p><p>And he wasn’t wasting a minute of it. He pushed himself to a sitting position. “Bucky,” he heard whispered in his ear. </p><p>“Right here, Steve,” he said, turning to him. The Shores around him were gone. Dark water and small finishing boats all around.</p><p>They were on a fisherman’s schooner, on the Hudson at night. A rod in the water. The river was serene, the moon crescent and perfect. And Steve was in front of him against the hull, between his legs, and he was behind him in the fishing chair. Steve was leaned over the side, gazing into the water. And he slowly, disbelievingly, slid his hand down Steve’s back.</p><p>Steve turned and smiled over his shoulder at him.</p><p>Panting, trying to keep his head clear, he couldn’t even return Steve’s smile, taking in the physical feeling his dreams could never supply. And he felt the hard, heavy things pounding in him.</p><p>“Ain’t no fish in this water,” Steve said, all sass.</p><p>“Just give it a minute,” he whispered breathlessly, feeling his hand reflexively tightening on Steve’s torso, digging into his body.</p><p>Steve straightened, with rather inconvenient timing, and slowly leaned back against his chest, head against his shoulder, melting against him. Eyes closed, Steve murmured, “Now he tells me.”</p><p>He sat very still. Shaking faintly while staring down at him. <i>I’m dreaming . . . </i> With the fishing chair hard against his back to assure him he wasn’t, he sat staring down at his glowing skin, the lashes of his closed eyes, his soft mouth. <i>Oh, God,</i> he groaned silently, shutting his eyes for a second. <i>I’m losing my mind.</i> Slowly locking his arms around him, he felt him hard and real and warm. Steve made a soft, approving, moaning sound and turned his face toward him. He let out a hard gasp and pressed a kiss to his face.</p><p>The kiss never happened. He was greeted by an explosion of noise and sound, the world collapsing around him as he was plunged once more into deep waters.</p><p>When the fury of bubbles cleared, the beautiful merman was already at a distance, wriggling his fingers, swimming away. He chased him fruitlessly, until he was exhausted, until he was dragging himself onto the Shores.</p><p>Luma was tending her fungi. </p><p>Slowly turning onto his back on the glittering milk sand, the air close, the indigo sky swirling with its perpetual band of onyx which revealed the glittering diamond stars.</p><p>“Bucky . . . ” she said.</p><p>She needn’t bother. </p><p>He didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. It was baking hot in his subconscious and he was exactly here for it.</p><p>He closed his eyes. Laid silently on his back until he fell asleep.</p><p>When he woke up he was alone on the Shores. Sitting up, he drew his knees up and sat staring at the multicolored Waters, the sand and surrounding forest. Then he leaned over and splashed some water on his face. And then stood up, following the heat of his heart, and walked toward the treeline. He had never entered the forest before, but this wasn’t really the forest. Once he crossed the treeline he saw that he was in a wooded area, beyond which were structures and animal habitats, and strolling people.</p><p>Brooklyn Zoo on a Sunday afternoon.</p><p>In his hands were two small bags of peanuts. Steve entered the wooded area from his right. And as Steve reached him, a pretty smile on his face, he handed him one of the peanuts. “Thank you, Bucky,” Steve said sweetly. And before Steve could move another foot he’d circled an arm around him and pulled him in. Steve came, one hand holding the peanuts, the other still at his side.</p><p>“Put your arms around me,” he instructed softly.</p><p>“With the peanuts?”</p><p>“Forget the peanuts.”</p><p>Steve smiled, and came until any gap between them was extinguished, and circled his arms around his waist. Locked them. “Like this?”</p><p>He couldn’t answer. A lot of things were happening at once and he didn’t know what kind of sound would come out of him if he tried to speak. It was almost too overwhelming to focus on the feeling. </p><p>It was like something more than in a lucid dream. Not erotic, in an explicit form, but somehow much more intense. Even deeper. Consciousness in the domain of dreams, so that he was both thought and his physical body.</p><p>And his physical body was in flames.</p><p>Steve stroked a lazy thumb along his lower back. And he closed his eyes, tightening both fists in Steve’s jacket, crushing every last peanut as electricity shot though him. He opened his eyes to see a smile in Steve’s eyes, and blinking down at their bodies, at Steve’s arms around him, trying to focus and feel and retain the sensations. <i>Fuck,</i> he thought miserably, not knowing what to do with himself. Could he have sex in here?</p><p>Slowly, Steve laid his head on his shoulder, glueing them head to toe. And he felt that everywhere. Steve was quiet. Nonreactive as he panted like an animal against his face.</p><p>Pushing his arms up on Steve’s back, he clutched Steve’s shirt and crushed Steve to him, not closing his eyes, but trying to close a circle. Because what he felt now was all he would have. He held him even tighter.</p><p>“Why won’t you kiss me,” he whispered desperately.</p><p>“Cuz you don’t want me to.”</p><p>Stunned, he turned a baffled look down at Steve’s face. “Why would you say that? I want it more than anything.”</p><p>“Well, then give it a try.”</p><p>He turned his head— </p><p>And was soon dragging himself onto the Shores.</p><p>Luma’s fungi were bigger. </p><p>And he continued refusing to acknowledge her presence. </p><p> </p><p>On his back, he sighed hard, deeply. The near orgasmic sensations faded almost as soon as he came out of the Water. But they were all he had.</p><p>The illusions were more than beautiful. It was his world, his subconscious, and given time, he was sure he could make it work.</p><p>“This place isn’t a playground, Bucky.”</p><p>He didn’t care.</p><p>“It’s not meant to be used like this. You’ll find no resolution here. Neither will it get easier to stop.”</p><p>Again.</p><p>“Bucky, you’re stronger than this.”</p><p>He wanted to kiss him. Just once. Then he would be able to move forward, listen to his letters, welcome him back, anything at all. He was well past caring about nonsense and crazy. It was how he felt.</p><p>He sat up and got to his feet, walking along the Shore. Until he saw him up ahead, seated on a wrought iron bench, and when he reached him they were at a seaside restaurant. Reaching out, he ran a hand along Steve’s jaw and Steve looked up at him with a smile. And he lowered himself until he was lying in his arms. Felt his bony legs beneath him, his thin body, as familiar as his own.</p><p>Steve smiled down at him, trailed his fingers through his hair.</p><p>“Whatcha been up to, Buck?”</p><p>“Nuthin’, I’ve been looking for you.”</p><p>Steve laughed a little. “You’re lookin’ for what’s right here?”</p><p>Without taking his eyes off him — he just couldn’t — he lifted Steve’s hand and laced their fingers. Steve’s eyes glowed happily down at him. He was gonna stay there forever. Bucky with the brain in his head, and that brain was addled. He was lying there in the arms of essentially his own thoughts, in a place in his own mind. And it was more than enough.</p><p> There was no leaving him behind again.</p><p>This was his Steve, and he couldn’t be Bucky without him.</p><p>“I wish you would kiss me.”</p><p>Steve’s smile took on a very subtle tinge of amusement. As if Steve knew something he didn’t. “Me too.”</p><p>“So why’d you say I didn’t want you to? I want you to.”</p><p>And reaching up he pushed his hand in Steve’s hair and pulled his head down. Imagined, pretended that they touched lips before the world crashed in a tsunami.</p><p>On the Shores, he laid on his back and sighed at the night sky.</p><p>Luma was now making a pot of sweet bean pudding on an open flame. She said nothing to him.</p><p>“I’m in love with two people,” he said, musingly. “And they’re both the same person.” He laughed senselessly. “My life is so fucked.”</p><p>“Your life is magic.”</p><p>He watched at the sensuous sky for a while. “He said he can’t kiss me because I don’t want him to.”</p><p>“Is that what you’re in there trying to do?” she asked. “Naughty Bucky.”</p><p>“But— is that true?”</p><p>“How should I know,” she said. “You really do believe I can read your mind.”</p><p>He sighed. Victory tattoos his ass. At this point he could write the Army training manual on advanced failure.</p><p>“You’re not a failure, Bucky. We don’t do shoddy work here.”</p><p>“Yeah? Well, I’m exhausted,” he told her, not fully catching what she had just replied to. “I swear to you I got nothing left to give.”</p><p>
  <i>“Oh, don’t be exhausted, Bucky. Now is when you must find the strength to give. Because much is coming.”</i>
</p><p>He turned and looked at her. “What?”</p><p>But she hadn’t spoken. And he realized that he hadn’t earlier either.</p><p>“You were in many wars, Bucky,” she said. “Too many for one mind. Then spent an artificially extended life under the suppression of your humanity. And now are putting yourself back together, mind, body and spirit. If you weren’t exhausted I’d be concerned.” She sighed. “But Bucky, what you’re doing isn’t going to get you there.”</p><p>Still staring at her, he was forcing his mind to stay on the moment. On the feeling that they had just talked about something else entirely.</p><p>Often he’d felt that way with her, but this time he was dead sure.</p><p><i>Because much is coming.</i> </p><p>He’d heard it loud and clear. But the longer he stared at her, the more he felt it had just been his imagination. This place amplifying every last thing going on inside him. </p><p>Letting it go, he just sighed again, laid back down and resumed looking at the sky.</p><p>“I’m not doing something right,” he said. “It’s like an arcade game that keeps resetting every time I get it wrong. What’s the secret. Just tell me.”</p><p>“I might as well tell you the secrets of the universe and you would comprehend as easily.” </p><p>“You know the secrets of the universe?” he asked mildly, prepared to be completely unsurprised if she said yes.</p><p>Instead she laughed. “No, Bucky, I don’t. I only know what I know.” Then after a pause, she said, “The human mind is a funny thing, isn’t it. The one thing you refused to talk about. To anyone, not even if Steve himself asked. Because that was a whole other thing, from a whole other world. Permanently gone.” She snorted. “And a whole other Bucky whose feelings and memories I guess you don’t carry? Apparently not.”</p><p>He turned and looked at her. “You just said you can’t read my mind. And I distinctly remember choosing not to tell you any of that.”</p><p>“Pff, anyone could hear that one.” </p><p>“Yes, if you’re a mind reader.” </p><p>She laughed. </p><p>And after a moment he asked her the question churning his stomach. “Is he running because he doesn’t want to be caught?”</p><p>“You would know the answer to that if you would just go home.”</p><p>She then stood up with two wooden bowls and spoons and came over to him. Sat with her knees folded to one side and set one of the bowls before him. He was all kinds of hungry except for food. </p><p>So he shifted closer and placed his head in her lap.</p><p>“There’ll be bean pudding all over you.”</p><p>“There’s a lake right there, lady.”</p><p>She laughed. Stroked his head while he closed his eyes.</p><p>— </p><p>Soon he was waking because she was soothing him awake with a hand on his face. He’d fallen asleep on the sand. Their meal was over since and she had since left him with cloth under his head.</p><p>He stirred slowly, heavily, against her hand.</p><p>“Go home, Bucky,” she said, frustrating him for sounding like weeks back and he wasn’t going back to such a state.</p><p>“He’s always here. But this Steve you’re trying to get with isn’t real. He’s just an avatar. Go home and listen to the real one. He has more letters to write you.”</p><p>“I know,” he whispered, unable even to open his eyes. “And I can’t wait to hear them. I love him so much.”</p><p>He turned his head, wiped his tears in the cloth. “He said he read my letters from the war. He sounded different. He’s <i>been</i> different since that first message weeks ago. He’s changed and I want know why, so badly. I haven’t been with him as myself since the war. I mean— not in a real sense. But I don’t wanna leave him. I just can’t. He needs me.”</p><p>“You carry him and the love you have for him with you. The magic you invoked between yourselves was strong enough, even without your doctors playing with magic they didn’t fully understand. Yes, you were both changed,” she said in kind, conceding tones. “But just as you were made whole, so he too wants to make himself whole. As he needed you in the past, so he needs you now. So he’ll need you in the future to come.”</p><p>He was half asleep trying to rouse himself, but once more heard. “What future? What future do you keep talking about? Am I asleep? Am I still dreaming?”</p><p>“You can help him, Bucky. But not here. Steve is trying to talk to you. Go and listen to him.” Then she took a quiet breath and said, “And find it in your heart to forgive him for changing your first love.”</p><p>His heart slipped from his chest, hearing words he had never thought he’d hear aloud. He wiped his face on the cloth. If he could have had the ground swallow him. “I don’t have anything to forgive him for. I’m the one who should be asking for his forgiveness. When I couldn’t just be happy for what had happened to him. Just because it was too difficult to understand.”</p><p>“There are no more secrets in your heart, Bucky. Recognize that what you had with him was only the beginning of your lives, and of your love. He has done something wonderful with it, if only you would go home and listen. With your <i>mind</i> as well as your heart. Then you’ll know how to cure this. Go home and listen.”</p><p>And then she said perhaps what he’d truly needed to hear.</p><p>“Hear his voice.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>≈≈</p>
</div>There had been a letter for each day he was gone. Four letters, neatly presented in a floating holographic stack in the hazel light of the dome. He didn’t listen to them. Not yet. Not when his mind felt like the glittering dust  in his bedroom, floating aimlessly in a bright beam of sunshine. He went straight into his bedroom and closed every shutter, pulled his bedclothes over his head and passed out.<p>He slept for two days. Then woke up so famished he ate for a solid hour. Silently, while staring out his kitchen window. A little surprised to see the world still carrying on as he had left it. It was morning and the farmers and artisans were on about their business, traversing the square and greeting each other. The herd was quiet, let out by Citu, and contentedly eating away on the grassland around his homestead. Once he was finished eating, he would check on old mister-goat. Then he would listen to Steve’s letters.</p><p>Steve had sent two more while he had been sleeping. And when he checked, their timestamps showed them to be much shorter than the previous four. Gut instinct told him those were the conclusions. Ready to listen, in his living room too he shut the shutters and pulled down cushions to lie on his back on the rug. Mom and pops had trotted fretfully back and forth across the front door as he had left them their treat bowl, refusing to eat. But he had let them rub their foreheads against his, letting them know, if they really could sense his feelings, that there was no running from what he had to do.</p><p>Staring not at a science fiction fantasy sky but at the smooth clay of the ceiling he had redone himself, he did his best to quiet his mind. And as instructed, listened with not just an emotional heart, but with a reasoning mind.</p><p><i>Eight months of sending you fancy twenty-first radio messages,</i> he remembered the first one saying, <i>and I never told you a damned thing. Sam said that in the War, you were the one I was writing letters to even when I wasn’t writing any. These are my letters to you, Bucky. Please wake up and read them.</i></p><p>“When you fell, when I thought I’d lost you forever, something changed in me. And I wish I could say what, but I’d be lying if I did. All those years I was busy trying to kick ass in Brooklyn, when I didn’t even know what. When you fell, when it mattered most that I step up, do just the <i>one</i> thing, the most important moment of my life, I failed. For months after, I drank. Every day I finished a bottle. Some days two. It was stupid, of course, not to mention useless. But mentally at least I could blind myself to an extent. Peggy took care of me. Saved me from a part of myself I <i>did not</i> have the emotional capacity to handle. The War itself became a distraction. If you can believe that. And I know it was war, but a lot of Hydra soldiers paid a price. I don’t regret it, and that’s a part of myself I’ll have to live with.”</p><p>He felt his eyebrows raising slightly, even though It took a moment for the words to fully sink in. But sink in they did.</p><p>“Waking up in the twenty-first century, I went looking for Peggy. I wish I’d taken the time to introduce you properly to her, Buck. She was somethin’ else. I remember you telling me to smile at her like a damn virgin and now I know why. She had so much to teach me. After you were gone I owed her everything I was. And I think she would have gotten a good laugh out of my situation now. Remarkable, she called our friendship. With that look in her eye. And there was me thinking she was making a passing comment. Well . . . anyway. Although I spent weeks telling myself that it hadn’t been some kinda sleeping in the ice for you too, that you were gone, I finally gave in and went back to Brooklyn.”</p><p>On the floor, he turned and looked at the dome still sitting on its mahogany side table.</p><p>“Wasn’t a fun day. Actually made it into the neighborhood. All those community gardens are gone of course. Brownstones are still there. But Buck, I stood on the other side of the street and couldn’t even cross to our side. Could barely even look over there.” </p><p>Then there was silence. But he didn’t have to look at the timer. He knew Steve as still there. Just feeling the same things he was.</p><p>Would he have been able to take himself back to the old neighborhood and look for a missing world? Just like that? No way. He’d barely had enough strength of mind to walk away from an illusion. But that was Steve through and through, brass balls all the way.</p><p>“I don’t know what kind of person I would have ended up being all by myself in this century. I really don’t. I’ve made great friends, but I was a walking crater.”</p><p>
  <i>Ah, Steve.</i>
</p><p>“And I <i>really</i> don’t know what kind of science fiction life a coupl’a kids from Brooklyn could suddenly find themselves in. But Buck, all’a this, this ain’t no coincidence. I know you’re laughing.”</p><p>He kind of was. Steve who would be so impatient listening to the ma’s talking about the big life stuff, complaining about how adults felt the need to philosophize and make superstition out of things like coincidence, when everyone knew life was noting but a bunch of random stuff happening.</p><p>“Tryn’a find comfort and meaning in random stuff, right? Meanwhile the real truth was just survival in the chaos. Pearls of wisdom from the mouthiest kid in all’a Brooklyn. Cause it can’t be coincidence that we’re here together in a brand new century, Buck. I don’t even care if I stayed sickly. This was meant to be. This is fate, kismet, all of that. And I take it very seriously. I take my part in it very seriously.</p><p>“When were kids I used to worship you. In case that wasn’t clear. In case it’s still not clear now. And you know . . . I used to . . . I’m not even surprised that I couldn’t get with a dame. I was so self-occupied, but it was a kind of self-occupation with you baked into it. You weren’t separate from my head, from myself. So maybe that was why. Not that I’m making excuses, but maybe it was why I felt so confident to be unthinking about you, because it seemed that you were a part of me, whatever my issues and wherever I went. I was a terrible son and a worse friend. I know that now. And I’ll forever be sorry for that. But every day of my life was special. Every day. Even the bad ones. Because of you, Bucky. And I know that, were she alive today, ma would feel the same way. I did see all you did for her. Our entire lives, all three of us in that house, I saw.”</p><p>It was incredible how . . . different Steve sounded. </p><p>He could hear his Steve. But . . . it wasn’t the Steve he knew. Not entirely. </p><p>Steve had become . . . Well, more. His clarity of thought was striking. As if the amplified Steve he had met in the war was only the beginning. And this voice . . .  </p><p>Some of it he recognized. Other parts were the stranger speaking. </p><p>Both, he realized in a slow dawning, were Steve. </p><p>“Reading your letters brought me— well, a lot of things. Self-awarenesses, a new beginning, as well as closure. Seventy years later, but hey. Because I’d put this one thing aside and now I wonder what I thought I’d gain by that, when it was really at the center of everything. When all along I was carrying it as a fear inside me. Bucky, the way you looked at me when I showed up in the War, like you didn’t know me, was gut wrenching. For the first time in our lives, I didn’t have you. I would talk and there was no recognition in your eyes. I can’t explain to you what that felt like. And I’ll still be selfish and say I don’t ever wanna feel that again. But Bucky I was so busy feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t once think of how it must have been for you.”</p><p>He blinked. Stopped thinking.</p><p>“I should have understood what you were going through. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to wake up and see me the way I am now. It wasn’t as if there was magic or enhancements like there is now to prepare us. You just had to wake up and see this.” Steve paused for a moment, before continuing. “I should have known then what I was to you. I was your Steve before I was the world’s. And I didn’t even give you the chance to acknowledge that something had changed. Much less to mourn that.”</p><p>Turning, he stared speechlessly at the dome.</p><p>“I’m sorry I never showed you the love I could have. The love you deserved.”</p><p>Sitting up, he tapped to stop the message.</p><p>Then sat there staring at the floating stack under the dome, which was depleted except for one. This was the last letter.</p><p>He stared nervously. Unsure why he was nervous. And tapped to play.</p><p>“And Bucky, you deserved it all. More than the Steve I was could ever give. You deserved better than him. I never took you for granted, but what good is that if you never knew. You were and always will be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I can’t change the past, I wish I could. But going forward I’m going to do everything right. Your Steve loves you, Bucky. And I don’t want to just tell you what kind of love I mean over the radio. I wanna show you. Can’t wait.”</p><p>The dome dimmed in his peripheral vision with a soft hum.</p><p>He laid back down, breathless, and stared at the ceiling. Moonlight pouring into his living room. Pouring onto the melted puddled that was Bucky Barnes on the floor.</p><p>—</p><p>He hadn’t understood when Luma had said to listen with his mind. Only vaguely understanding that he needed to hear Steve’s voice. Now understood. Steve had a new voice. </p><p>It was mature and considered and . . . fucking sexy. Steve had changed. Even from the war. Even from nine months ago. They were going to discover themselves anew in this century and he couldn’t even let himself think about what it was going to be like, since he was sure his resulting dreams would nuke the neighborhood.</p><p>So why was the Steve he had loved all his life still in those Caverns, inside his heart. Why when he thought about him did his heart still beat. Why did it still hurt, and still feel that they about to discover what he would make sure was a beautiful future together, but that they were leaving him behind. <i>Why</i> was it the way the mind worked. He would call Steve right now if he felt with even a little bit of confidence that the feeling was gone. </p><p>But since returning from the Caverns he had faced a deeper truth.  That even discounting the two years he had struggled on his own against Hydra’s control, even if he claimed Hydra’s damage and the process of reknitting his brain had effected a psychological reset, he’d had months now to figure this out. Months instead in which he had pretended it didn’t exist. And the deeper truth was the real one — that in the war he had accepted Steve’s change. Not, as even Steve now recognized, processed it. </p><p>If he called Steve, if he saw Steve, he didn’t know what he would feel. What happened if he saw Steve and his reaction was like in the war. He couldn’t keep being the one to hurt them both. </p><p>Steve was grown. His anguish was gone. His pain was gone. The confidence his transformation had given him was properly applied. Steve was ready for him. He wasn’t ready for Steve.</p><p>—</p><p>“What tension did you think I had?” he asked Weshi, the bouncer who’d given him his card, over the phone.</p><p>An hour later they were walking into a gym. Sky high, glass fronted floors dedicated to just about every sport or fitness scheme, plus medical facilities, restaurants, anything imaginable to do with fitness.</p><p>While Weshi checked them in at the front desk, he looked far up at the transparent floors, replacing workout rooms in their day which often just used to be dingy storage backrooms, and now even prettier and more impressive than the Chrysler Building eighty years ago. At times like this he was really ware of living in the future. And almost instinctually, he looked for Steve by his side.</p><p>Their destination was fifteen stories up, and rising in the elevators, he looked out at the bright white sky, the sunlight gleaming across the hulls of the hovercrafts and refracting off the vibranium skyscrapers. Inside, the boxing gym was classic in style — ropes and rings, chairs surrounding, with a main sparring ring in the center.</p><p>The coaches saw him enter, nodding at him, before glancing at his sling, then toward the sections of the gym Weshi had said contained only machine sparring equipment. Letting him know of their awareness that he wasn’t about to be let into a ring with non-enhanced humans. Letting <i>them</i> know he got it, he and Weshi took seats rows back.</p><p>Sitting back in their seats, watching the sparring, he missed the sport terribly. And suddenly, he understood what it must have felt like for Steve back in the day. How often had Steve wanted to spar with him and he had dodged the hell out of the issue — he found himself almost snorting, amused. Now Steve could spar all right.</p><p>At a point he turned to Weshi and simply said, “Thanks.” And Weshi nodded and said, “You’re welcome.”</p><p>—</p><p>A few days after that, days he spent returning to the boxing gym, even though he still didn’t yet feel a desire to throw a single punch, Weshi took him to the real eye opener. A traditional Wakandan fight match unlike anything he had ever seen. </p><p>And throughout, he was thinking about nothing but Steve. </p><p>In retrospect, he supposed it was to be expected that it would be attending fight matches and being around professional fighters that would finally hit him in the face with the answer that was staring right at him all along.</p><p>The fights were breathtaking. Held on carved out floors in the surrounding cliff faces, in pools of water fed by crashing waterfalls. The entire site overlooking the rivers coursing the Rift Valley.</p><p>Steve didn’t know from Wonderland.</p><p>The style was purely exhibition, there was no hitting or punching, but rather was a combination of traditional wrestling and martial art, the goal only to bring your opponent to physical submission. Warriors covered in clay paints, the art his neighborhood kids bestowed on him, at real work. Men with builds of a kind he had never seen. </p><p>It was amazing, thrilling watching men fight men, women fight women, then combinations of both. The female warriors used intelligence and skill against male opponents who didn’t have the capacity, the smarter male warriors who felt their physical strength to be their advantage, and had enough sense not to fall for the cunning, cornering their female counterparts. </p><p>The arena rang out with cries and hollering and laughter, and it reminded him of taking Steve to the Joe Louis and Max Schmeling fights in ’36 and ’38. How they had screamed until they had lost their voices, and talked about it for months.</p><p><i>Steve would love this,</i> he then thought, laughing, turning once more to Weshi and nodding his thanks.</p><p>Weshi leaned over, calling above the cheering crowd, “Maybe when Captain Rojaz returns you two can throw your names in the ring!”</p><p>He glanced over and smiled, but shook his head.</p><p>But, as spectacular as the matches were, it seemed the real action was the afterparty.</p><p>Adults-only, Weshi told him. And was it ever.</p><p>There, the male and female warriors partied and interacted in . . . much more interesting combinations that even their fights.</p><p>Held far up above the city in someone’s apartments overlooking Zana. Apartments impressive enough to rival the royal suites he’d been given way back when. He and Weshi arrived like movie stars, him the known superhuman, Weshi the friend who took all the glory. It was amusing.</p><p>“Who’s that?” he said, almost as soon as they walked in, at a hot little number. She seemed the center of attention.</p><p>“Haa! No, Bucky, no. Please don’t be curious in that direction. Don’t even look. That’s the King’s heart walking around like that.”</p><p>He smiled to himself. “Well, that explains things.”</p><p>“Bucky, you’re still looking.”</p><p>“Just curious.”</p><p>“But I just said no. I’m not a warrior like you. I don’t want to have to fight the King on your behalf.”</p><p>His smile only widened. “Then you don’t know what a fight is.”</p><p>Weshi laughed hugely. “Captain America versus Iron Man, am I right?”</p><p>“You ain’t wrong.”</p><p>Weshi kept laughing. “You warriors are terrible people.”</p><p>And as soon as they were positioned out on the patio, it seemed his victory tattoos and Steve Rojaz were all anyone cared about. Warriors, apparent fans, spectators, endlessly coming up.</p><p>After hasty congratulations on his healing, pressingly, and without exception, the question was when Steve would be landing in Wakanda.</p><p>A little startled, he heard himself repeating “Soon, soon,” at the unexpected inundation.</p><p>“Steve Rojaz will come for you, White Wolf,” they would say passionately, before leaving.</p><p>Until, giving him, with no strength to spare to try and figure it out, he leaned over to Weshi. “What does that mean? He will come for you?”</p><p>“It means he has your back.” Weshi turned and looked at him. “What did you think it meant?”</p><p>He straightened, shook his head. “Nothing in particular,” he covered.</p><p>Weshi kept looking at him, maybe sensing his disappointment. And said, “There is no higher guarantee from your <i>mohree,</i>” their word for both brothers and sisters, “in arms.”</p><p>“Yeah? A guarantee of what?”</p><p>Weshi glanced at him. “If your Wakandan brothers and sisters are telling you that your person will come for you, then believe your story will have a happy ending.”</p><p>He lowered his gaze, okay with that.</p><p>Weshi reminded him of home. Of the confidence of the person he used to be. Before Hydra broke him. He used to be Bucky Barnes, a street fighter, and nothing scared him. Nothing. Now he was scared of his own heart.</p><p>Feeling eyes on him, he simply sat with his head turned to his right, and saw he was being watched. Well first he was watching male and female pair of warriors who’d fought as a tag team . . . um, actually tag teaming a guy seated between them. Who seemed quite lost in seventh heaven from all the neck licking. The feeling of being watched was the female warrior staring at him. When she caught his eye, she gave him a hike of her eyebrow.</p><p><i>But Brooklyn, this ain’t,</i> he thought, still staring.</p><p>And suddenly he began remembering being eighteen and trying to explain how sex worked to Steve. And he lowered his head and killed a smile. Would Steve love <i>this.</i> An answer, he supposed, only this Steve could give him.</p><p>They got visited by a clutch of guys from the gym, including a young man in their midst with a leather satchel slung across his shoulder. Who first congratulated him in Common Wakandan on his tattoos, which frankly at this point, he couldn’t wait for the two weeks it took for the things to fade, before opening his satchel. And the next thing he knew, little containers were being arrayed before them on their cocktail table. It took him a moment to realize what they were. </p><p>Fucking aphrodisiacs.</p><p>“Take this stuff out of here!” Weshi cried. “He just got cleared for normal business and you want him to take the express. He’ll hurt himself! Move!”</p><p>The guy left. And Weshi leaned over to him. “Or wait, Bucky. Is <i>everything</i> enhanced?”</p><p>And he laughed and laughed, and Weshi had no idea why, but the most he could do was turn away and shake his head. </p><p>His life <i>was</i> magic, he had to admit.</p><p>Then a joyous chorus of “Bucky, Bucky!” reached them, and looking over, it took a moment to identify the handful of young Wakandans practically tripping their way toward them. Then he recognized them. </p><p>They were the operators of the skydiving service the Queen Mother’s warriors had used to drop him, when he’d first woken and been so fueled with out of control rage and the single primal scream that had been his fifty years of bondage.</p><p>Like a flock of gazelles, they settled around him, saw his tattoos, screamed with pleasure and told him they wanted to be the first to drop him and Steve Rojaz from the skies.</p><p>“But first,” they said, “Babahl, but first!”</p><p>So they left their cards, telling him they’d give him a discount and to come by for a victory dive. </p><p>That, Weshi approved of, took the glittering cards.</p><p>“Can I ask you something?” he said, when they were once again alone. “Why’s everyone so interested?”</p><p>“In you and Steve Rojaz?” He nodded. And the bouncer said, “Listen. Wakandans love a good story. Centuries ago we had a small civil war because two of the King’s sons were in love with the same guy from the River Tribes. You know those people are very mysterious. You know, you’re with their Old Women. Apparently the guy was too hot, so next thing, there was war. And the Kingdom took sides. Ask most Wakandan warriors today and they’ll tell you that’s the period they most wished to have lived in. Things were hot those days, Bucky. I mean hot. It’s not like today where you have these warriors just messing around, look at them — look, not knowing what real battle is. Half the time just fucking each other. But here you are, your story mixed up with not one, but two Kings. You and Steve Rojaz are the closest thing most of our warriors have to those times. So believe that they’ll stick close.” Weshi then glanced at him. “There’s your answer. That’s why everyone is so interested.”</p><p>Staring at the <i>degewor</i> he’d placed on the center table — no palm wine here, they’d told him, this wasn’t a village party — he was without the words to express a single thing he was feeling. </p><p>“It’s good to see you smiling, Bucky.”</p><p>He looked at Weshi. “I was smiling?”</p><p>Weshi laughed. “Congratulations on your victory.”</p><p>Sitting back, he tipped his head back and stared at the night sky. If as a teenager anyone had told him that he would live to see the astounding future he had always believed him, he would have told them to go get a publisher.</p><p>His gaze on the glittering Backbone of Night, he thought, <i>Steve would love it here.</i></p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>≈≈</p>
</div>Shuri left a message in the morning, updating him on the boyfriend front, no decisions made yet. Then, fervently and emotionally, poured out her hopes that he was rethinking putting off calling Steve a moment longer. “Bucky,” she whispered breathlessly. “How? How can you be so heartless? Call him . . .”<p>He himself was soon back in Zana buying Weshi a thank-you brunch.</p><p>Seated at an outdoor cafe, half the time he was thanking people passing by congratulating him on his victory art. God damn, had he known the wide ranging cultural implications, he would have skipped the damn thing. Although something told him that Citu had known perfectly well.</p><p>But it was a glorious morning. They were on the central boulevard of the city center, a klick or so down from where Shuri’s boyfriend issues had played out, and where Weshi’s club was located. The boulevard glittered with life and people in the morning sunshine.</p><p>“Bucky,” Weshi was saying, dipping tea bags and softly clinking a tiny teaspoon as he stirred. “When Steve Rojaz is coming back, please let me know well ahead of time. We’ll make it a special night at the club. Impose a color code that’s both your special colors. Ruby and silver. Hot stuff. I know you couples love that kind of thing.”</p><p><i>Couples?</i> he thought, confused. <i>What couple?</i></p><p>And then he stopped. Weshi was talking about him and Steve.</p><p>At his silence, Weshi continued. “It’s so cool that you two have known each other since childhood. And that he’ll battle anyone for you. Hold on to that one, as my mother would say. I even had one or two bold individuals asking for your number at the party and I said are you crazy? You want to battle Captain America? Nevertheless, he’d better hurry. You’ve been cleared for business and you are hot stuff in this town.”</p><p>He sat staring speechlessly at Weshi as if he had never so much as heard speech in his life. The words suddenly seemed so alien to him. </p><p>And then had him simply looking around as if he had never been in downtown Zana. As if he had only just suddenly been dropped into the twenty-first century.</p><p>His mind was suddenly a blank. Yet seemed to be doing a slow revolution.</p><p>For decades he would see himself reflected in passing and not recognize himself. And now it was occurring to him that he wasn’t seeing the picture that was slowly forming. That had already formed.</p><p>Here he too was . . . more. He wasn’t just Bucky from the block. Here he was the White Wolf, a warrior and survivor or wars. Here everyone seemed to know who he was.</p><p>His own new self. Healed.  And . . . open for business.</p><p>And as Luma kept trying to make him understand, and even Steve had since accepted, whatever his mundane mind wanted to make of it, this science fiction magical world was as real as anything. As real as him having a bionic arm and being able to fall from the sky and not injure himself.</p><p>Suddenly he was looking around at the glittering, shining silver city — at the bars, the eateries, the theaters, the beautiful, friendly people, their magical science. </p><p>A living future-world.</p><p>He was in <i>his</i> future world.</p><p>He was living in the past when everything he had spent his life imagining was right here, all around him. Waiting for him.</p><p>All his plans were still in place, he realized with the shock of a bomb shell landing on the ground.</p><p>He had the domestic life; he’d say the Avengers beat the hell out of the merchant marines; Steve was the healthy warrior Steve had always dreamed of being. And apparently even Weshi’s mother would accept him for who he was.</p><p>And he and Steve didn’t have to be with other people. They could actually just be with each other. It was even expected that they would be together. </p><p>Every last one of his plans was in place. And better. All he was missing was Steve himself. </p><p>The cycle of living and dying had restarted, and he hadn’t even noticed. He was stuck in the past.</p><p>Yet it wasn’t until his eyes caught the glint of sunlight off the central monuments of Panthers, seen all the way at the end of the boulevard like the Arch of Victory on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, the monuments he passed so often and imagined showing a teenaged Steve . . . that the turn clicked in place.</p><p>And suddenly he knew exactly what he was supposed to do.</p><p>—</p><p>Back at the Shores, he told Luma he needed her help. He spoke openly to her. Sensing that it was going to take just that, he started all the way from inside.</p><p>“I’ve been going with you mind reading my thoughts and feelings and whatever else. But I wanna stop that. I wanna start speaking about myself. About how I feel and who I am. Because that’s the core of me. My name is Bucky Barnes, and I’m from Brooklyn, New York.”</p><p>She smiled.</p><p>“Wait,” he warned.</p><p>“Go ahead,” she said.</p><p>“I was taken during the Second World War and turned into into an automaton. But this Irish kid, who’s the love of my life, rescued me. Brought me here, saved my life. I’m in love with Steve Rogers and I always have been. I wanna be with him. I wanna spend the rest of my life with him. And I want to see him here in Wakanda and tell him just that.”</p><p>Now he looked towards the corridors of the tunnels. They were at the mouth, on the edge of the Entrance Cavern.</p><p>“Do you know what to do?”</p><p>“Yes, I think so.”</p><p>He continued staring. “What happens when I catch him?”</p><p>“Well, it will be over.”</p><p>“How will I know?”</p><p>“You won’t doubt it, Bucky. Just remember that he’s not here with you, whatever it looks like. He’s wherever he is until the day his jet lands in Wakanda.”</p><p>She had paused. “You said you wanted my help with something?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said absently, and turned to look at her. Stared at her alabaster eyes. “I want you to tell me I’m not crazy. Tell me I’m not napping on a baking hot weekend and having the wildest dream of all time. That there was another world war and Steve and I got caught up in an adventure too insane for even the zaniest dime-store scifi pulp. Tell me I’m actually standing here before a crazy old mermaid in a hidden, magical East African kingdom, about to go do some magic. Go on, tell me this is real.”</p><p>She laughed until she was breathless, then gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “In you go, Bucky. And best of luck.”</p><p>Next thing, he and Steve were dancing, of all things. A waltz. They were in at the pier, and not really dancing, just listening to the live back in the background on the boardwalk, while he sat on a tier of the railing with Steve standing between his knees. He held Steve’s hands.</p><p>Steve stood smiling expectantly, waiting for him to say something. And he knew exactly what. “Steve, look at me.” </p><p>Steve did.</p><p>“Do you see me?” </p><p>Steve stared and stared. Then, his luminous eyes on him, Steve smiled.</p><p>“Yeh.”</p><p>Blinking his prickling eyes, he took a moment to compose himself. “What’do you see?”</p><p>Steve’s smile only seemed to get more radiant. “I see that you’re beautiful. And that you love me.”</p><p>He nodded, pushing down he emotions. He closed his hands around Steve’s, hardly believing it had taken him this long.</p><p>“Come with me.”</p><p>“Where?”</p><p>“Where else?” he said. “To the future.”</p><p>Steve glanced around. “How do we get there?”</p><p>“Do you trust me?”</p><p>“That a question, Bucky?”</p><p>“Then listen.” He slowly put his forehead against his, and closed his eyes. “I love you, Steve. With all my heart. I loved every day of our lives. It was my pleasure to take care of you, and it always will be.”</p><p><i>I love you too, Bucky,</i> he heard in every part of his mind. He opened his eyes, pulled back a little so he could see his face. </p><p>“Now, I’m gonna kiss you.”</p><p>“You are?”</p><p>Steve looked both bemused and surprised, and he got it now. He hadn’t wanted Steve to kiss him here, until he was ready for Steve.</p><p>He nodded. Practically hyperventilating, he gently made a fist in Steve’s shirt, making sure neither of them was about to disappear.</p><p>Then he kissed Steve. Kissed and kissed and kissed his mouth, until he heard Steve whimper, “Oh, mother . . .” And breaking the kiss he gasped and laughed with pure, ecstatic pleasure while Steve stared at him as though he had never seeing him before. “Put your arms around me,” he whispered to him. “And hold tight.”</p><p>Steve did. And it crashed the world. </p><p>And came that explosion of sound and that great fucking plunge as they were both sent feet first into the Waters.</p><p>Rising up around them with a massive surge, this time he wouldn’t let Steve go inside the Waters. He felt Steve wriggling, but he tightened his grip on him, slipping his arm around him and hauling them both out of the Waters. Onto the Shores, on his back, with Steve on top of him.</p><p>It was a full on purple night, the onyx band softly swirling across the heavens, the milk sands glittering like crushed diamonds all around. The man in his arms was big, with a body as dense as iron. On top of him, Steve was soaking wet like him, looking around in confusion. At the Shores, his eyes as present and as conscious of his surrounding as he had hardly ever seen in their daily lives. But even confused now, there was nothing but confidence, focus and determination on his face. Where the near permanent furrow in his brow would be was smoothed out. No anguish present anywhere on his face.</p><p>It was Steve. Just bigger and stronger, with a body now that could at last take that heart.</p><p>Clear as starlight, he understood it now.</p><p>Steve looked down at him. Seeing him.</p><p>“<i>Bucky?!</i>” Steve gasped, from wherever he was in the universe. </p><p>“Yes, Steve,” he panted, nearly laughing with relief. “<i>Yes.</i> It’s me. It’s us.” And he laid back, letting his arm fall to the side, his body going slack with relief. “We’re here.”</p><p>“But we were just at the pier.”</p><p>“And we’re here now, Steve. We’re here.” He closed his eyes with a sigh, softly, ecstatically. “We’re fucking here.” And he let out a long, deep sigh. “See you soon, buddy.”</p><p>There was silence. Steve was gone, of course. </p><p>The dreams and visions were gone.</p><p>Everything was done.</p><p>It was over. It was all finally over.</p><p>—</p><p>“Babahl!” cried the jump guide as the wind rushed through the open side of the Wave Rider. “You look <i>fine</i> this morning! You’re lucky I’m a married man!” Laughter. “Are you ready?”</p><p>“Yeah!” he cried.</p><p>“Let’s go, let’s go!” The Wave Rider banked hard to one side, and the hands of skydiving service operators stayed on his shoulders, all of them channeling their happiness sand support, until the right moment and he parted ways with the Wave Rider, launching himself into the clear white sky. </p><p>From the effect of the Dome, he could still see starlight glittering all across the heavens even in the daytime. Wind rushed in his ears, around his head as he fell backwards, head first, thru the atmosphere. The Waters were far below, and when he struck it the impact would be jolting, sending a shock though his system that would be perfect, freeing, a reset of his life. His baptism into a new life.</p><p>And when he hit, the Waters knowing what he wanted, gave him just that jolt, and he sank, and sank, until far beneath, there was a profound peace.</p><p>When he slowly opened his eyes, he saw the glowing underwater Entrance to the hidden world. And swam to it.</p><p>— </p><p>Luma walked him slowly toward the distant entrance. Even from far, the strange summer’s day of the Interior gave off a heat that was wafting down the tunnels.</p><p>“You smell very nice this morning, Bucky. And I’m sure you look just as handsome.”</p><p>“He’ll <i>see</i> me.”</p><p>“He’ll see you. So I suppose it was important to look your best.”</p><p>“And it’ll be physical. Like I am now. It won’t be a dream, or an illusion or some crap like that?”</p><p>“Crap, he says. All the things which helped him heal, now they’re crap.”</p><p>“But . . .” his voice faded as he looked toward the cave entrance. “How?”</p><p>“How do you think? Magic,” she said, laughing despite herself. As buoyant as he felt, she sounded the same. “I can’t keep explaining it to you. Obviously you believe it because you went and bathed and now you smell like a prince about to attend his own wedding. I don’t know why, because I told you that you can’t go in there and sex him up, you can only talk.”</p><p>“And— I can’t touch him.”</p><p>“No, Bucky, that is not advisable. No exceptions. You two might find yourselves stuck there, doing naughty things for the rest of eternity, as it is the most potent of all places. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t send you in there if you were not ready. Just give him your message. Keep it brief. I’ll be waiting right here.”</p><p>They had reached the cave entrance. He glimpsed inside, his heart in his throat. “Is he in there?”</p><p>“No, not yet.” She paused, her hand on his arm. “All right. You know the questions I must ask you. They are just the same as when we completed your desensitization months back.” </p><p>He straightened, nodding, prepared. </p><p>And she went down the list: Had he told them everything that was in his heart? Were his thoughts focused, strong and clear? Were his memories true? He answered yes to all.</p><p>“Now go, Bucky,” she said softly, pushing him as gently.</p><p>Instead he turned to her, wrapping her with his arm holding her close and burying his face in her flowery mass of scented grey curls. She laughed delightedly. Then he straightened, smiled at her alabaster eyes, and turned and faced the golden world beyond.</p><p>He stepped inside.</p><p>•</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. REMARKABLE</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Guess what?<br/>  <span class="big"><span class="big"></span><br/><b>;)</b><br/>  </span> </p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>    </p>
</div><hr/>
<p><br/>
What . . . in heaven’s name . . . was happening.</p>
<p>Had he just . . . been . . . with Bucky? </p>
<p>He was lying flat on his back in his bed soaking wet. Like he had just gotten out of a lake. Except that— he looked down at himself. No, he was perfectly dry.</p>
<p>He fell back on the pillows, confused. Closing his eyes, he tried to catch the images from the dream. There had been . . . He’d fallen into multicolored waters, but maybe that was from the memory of that lake of multicolored flowers he’d seen in the Connected Realm. But then . . . there’d also been a green lake in his dream. But that too seemed from just recently thinking about that lake outside of Lisbon where Bucky had jumped in after him. But . . . in the dream Bucky <i>had</i> been there, holding him tightly, somehow struggling with him. Then  he remembered . . . a beach and a forest. But a sight like something out of a fantasy painting. And then he had looked down to find Bucky under him. He had <i>seen</i> Bucky.</p>
<p>Although not quite. Bucky too had seemed more like a color painting, like an impression of Bucky. But Bucky had on a type of fitted cover on his arm that he had never seen before. In a color that hadn’t been in that box.</p>
<p>He’d even <i>spoken</i> to him.</p>
<p>But he couldn’t remember what he had said. </p>
<p>But even as he tried to hold the thoughts, the images wafted away, like blowing at smoke, leaving only the sensation . . . of fading pleasure. </p>
<p>It seemed . . . Bucky had kissed him.</p>
<p>On the mouth.</p>
<p>Letting out a long, silent breath, he laid back down and simply did what he’d been doing for days now. He just let it go.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Inside the Quinjet’s empty cargo hold, he put his arm against the bulkhead, taking a moment to pull himself together. For days, ever since his dream of Bucky appearing and saying to meet him in Wonderland, he’d been swamped with sensations of physical proximity to Bucky. And if that wasn’t odd enough on its own, proximity of a kind he’d spent the past couple weeks failing at. Sensations more than dreams, and lingering all day. It certainly wasn’t his imagination, since apparently he didn’t have one. Feelings of physically touching Bucky, touching his face, his hair, his mouth, just as he’d been trying in all his attempts at fantasies. Except there were no images, just feeling. </p>
<p>Which was the issue. </p>
<p>Right then, he could feel the aftereffects of Bucky’s body against him. He’d just been hugging Bucky, as far as his body could tell. The feel of their faces next to each other was as definite as the bulkhead against his arm. As though if he merely turned his head right now they would be breathing in the same space. He had never felt anything as odd. And that wasn’t even getting to his nights before falling asleep, before dreams came and actually saved him from even rougher waters.</p>
<p>He straightened as voices began moving into the corridor. He could hear everything on the Quinjet if he gave it his attention, and recognized as Natasha and two new Shield operatives entered the short corridor leading to the cargo hold. The three cleared the threshold. Natasha briefly recapped for the operatives the protocol for securing Chitauri weapons cases, then dismissed them. She turned to a terminal and began tapping in an update to the task.</p>
<p>“Do you have a fever?” she asked. “Can you get a fever?”</p>
<p>“No to both. Why?”</p>
<p>“You’ve been flushed for about a week straight. A normal person would be dead by now.”</p>
<p>He snorted quietly. Leaned against the bulkhead, pretended to be reading his pad. </p>
<p>“Steve . . . are you all right?”</p>
<p>He kept looking at the fields of information he had finished inputting some time ago. Normally he’d tell her or anyone asking that he was fine. And he usually was. Because he always knew that he’d be all right. </p>
<p>But he wasn’t fine. And he didn’t know whether he’d be all right.</p>
<p>She turned from the terminal and faced him. All five foot four inches of her, yet somehow like a steel door. “Steve,” she said. “Sometimes, it helps to talk.”</p>
<p>“I’m aware of that,” he said truthfully. “It’s just— I don’t know. I need to figure some stuff out.”</p>
<p>She nodded, and leaving, came over and closed a hand over his shoulder, offered him a small smile before departing.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Returning to the Helicarrier, they offloaded their five detainees, and as he’d been doing for days, he scanned the flight deck. But there’d been no signs of Richard Jones since the night in his quarters. Neither did he expect to find any. And he was sure that he wouldn’t see him again until Rick gave SHIELD the slip to come find him once more. Because he got the feeling that SHIELD was hiding Rick.</p>
<p>Whatever work Rick was doing for them, it seemed it was too important to risk him running into Rick on the flight deck or elsewhere. Because that man would be sorry.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Apart from the sensations bombarding him throughout the day, his nights were even worse. A barrier of some kind had broken, and all those mental attempts with Bucky he’d been struggling with, trying to get there, wondering whether it was that he didn’t find Bucky physically attractive. Well. </p>
<p>It was exactly as Sam as had predicted. Thirteen all over again and having no control. </p>
<p>Nights, turned on his side, he clutched his pillow and tried to lie still, while caught between a dream and something more physical. Something squeezing his body without an ounce of input from him. Not letting up until he was shuddering in climax. In a fevered state during, afterward he opened his eyes each time praying he wasn’t, but was always having to stand up after and go change his pajama bottoms.</p>
<p>He’d been infatuated many times, had even half lost his mind when Peggy at last took him to bed. This, however, was something else.</p>
<p>≈≈</p>
<p>A little after 4 a.m., he went down to sick bay. A dormitory style section decks beneath their habitat level with frosted glass partitions for privacy. On their last raid to grab the detainees, Sam had broken his arm and hadn’t told anyone. Just applied some Stark Industry pain gels and carried on.</p>
<p>It hurt to see Sam laid out, doped up, arm slinged. Not that Sam, Clint, Natasha, and even Tony hadn’t had to find themselves in a sick bay once in a while. Not that he didn’t know what broken bodies in an aid station looked like. More that for him, with the kind of obliviousness he’d had all his life, he was perpetually surprised when non-sickly people found themselves bedridden. In his head, it was either you were hit with imminent death or you kicked until you were in fact dead. His idiot self had never had an in-between. Never considered that the proper thing to do when you were sick was to just take it easy and get taken care of. If he would ever write the book the Smithsonian still nearly daily begged him to, it would be entitled <i>You’re an idiot, take it from me, Steve Rogers.</i></p>
<p>So he sat beside Sam, reading. Nodding and maintaining as harmless an expression as he could manage when the doctor came by to check on Sam, eyeing him as though he was there to give her grief. She swept keen eyes over his reading material, around his seat, as though looking for contraband. “He’s medicated,” she finally said, giving up. “And we gotta get that bone healing fast, so . . . no funny business.”</p>
<p>“No, m’am,” he said, and pulled on a smile, but only managing a half one, wondering what aid station doctors she’d been talking to.</p>
<p>Sam woke at about 6 a.m. He smiled as Sam’s eyes opened and slid his way. “Hey, slacker,” he said, lowering the SHIELD tactical manual he was reading. “How’ya been?”</p>
<p>“Great,” Sam croaked. “I feel great.”</p>
<p>“You’re gonna tell us the next time you’re busted up so Natasha and I can do something to help?”</p>
<p>Sam yawned. “Can you distill your blood?”</p>
<p>“Hah.”</p>
<p>“Thennn I’m good.” Sam lowered his gaze to his plastered arm. “What’s a little broken bones among friends.” Rubbing his eyes, Sam glanced over. “What’re you reading?”</p>
<p>He lifted the field tactical manual. Sam grimaced. “Listen,” he said, “let’s just thank God I can read. It was touch and go there for a minute as a kid.”</p>
<p>Sam laughed softly. And it was good to see it. “What’s happening topside?”</p>
<p>“Oh, you know. New operatives to run through.”</p>
<p>“And in your quarters?”</p>
<p>He slid Sam a patient look. Which Sam didn’t see thankfully. </p>
<p>“Still having dreams?”</p>
<p>He paused for a second. “Yeah, actually.”</p>
<p>“More dark dreams?”</p>
<p>He skipped a beat.</p>
<p>Sam started laughing hoarsely. “The other kind. Are we immersed yet?”</p>
<p>“Ah, quit it.”</p>
<p>“Called it.”</p>
<p>Sam laid there and laughed himself to tears. Wiped the corner of his eye. “Steve, you are a bottomless well of entertainment. What was your breakthrough moment. Did you get an internet account somewhere and see how it’s done?”</p>
<p>Again he paused, this time involuntarily. He wished it had been that mundane a breakthrough.</p>
<p>Not wanting to think abut it then, he nonetheless found himself thinking about it. He wasn’t the kind of person to conflate things, confuse bad actions with good ones, or have a problem separating the two and calling it <i>complicated.</i> What Richard Jones had done to him was a violation and an aggression that required payback. What had resulted from it had happened. And since it had to do with Bucky and no one else was hurt, it was a good result and he would take it. He had no doubt that he would have gotten there with Bucky. No doubt at all. And he could take a personal slight. He knew how to avenge that.</p>
<p>“You don’t have to tell me,” Sam said, when he hadn’t answered. “I know how it goes.” Sam drowsily blinked at the ceiling. “So you are all in for Bucky Barnes, huh.”</p>
<p>“All right, well, Sam. Say it a little louder.”</p>
<p>Sam fell quiet, sighing. “You know,” Sam said contemplatively. “This whole thing has been a learning experience in not judging people. We all knew him as this withdrawn, brooding terror. Like, you had to sleep with one eye open around him. And yeah I know that he was brainwashed and programmed to turn into that, but honestly, I thought there had to have been some underlying bad person that Hydra just tapped into, you know?”</p>
<p>“Well, Sam, that hurts to hear.”</p>
<p>“I know, Steve, that’s what I’m saying. His letters show this . . . really good hearted person. Thoughtful and smart. And loved him some Steve Rogers.”</p>
<p>He smiled, lowered his head. <i>And Steve Rogers loved him back.</i></p>
<p>“If I hadn’t read those letters,” Sam continued, wonderingly, “nothing could have convinced me that— well, you know.”</p>
<p>“Well, those letters don’t tell a fraction of who that guy is. I wish you’d known Bucky before all of this. Bucky’s one in a million. And there is no greater sin than what Hydra did to him.”</p>
<p>Sam took a long breath. “I know I should be tempted to insert an assassin joke here . . . but this whole thing, plus the drugs, is starting to get me emotional.”</p>
<p>He laughed. “Thanks.” Then he glanced over. “Hey, listen, Sam. I wanna thank you. I think you changed my life.” </p>
<p>“I did change your life.”</p>
<p>He nodded. “You did change my life.”</p>
<p>Sam yawned once more. “Better. We like you assertive, Cap.” And sighed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m starving.”</p>
<p>“I’ll take care of it,” he said, reaching over to push the call button. “Get better, Sam,” he told him, to Sam tiredly nodding. Then he sat back. “Gotta split. We have a briefing for said new set before the next mission. On which we will miss you.”</p>
<p>“Of course I’m coming.”</p>
<p>“No, you’re not, Sam. And that’s an assertion.”</p>
<p>As he stood, Sam said, “Hey, you notice how they keep rotating them on us? Wouldn’t it be more logical to assign us a permanent support team?”</p>
<p>“It’s not a coincidence,” he told Sam. “It’s a need-to-know method. Shield doesn’t want anyone to have all the pieces.”</p>
<p>“All the pieces to what?”</p>
<p>“Exactly.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Later that afternoon inside a security office, he was viewing the footage from the night of Rick’s break-in. The cameras picked up neither how Rick had entered his quarters — even though his door registered the entry — nor when Rick exited. Just showed him running out, then Natasha, then Sam walking out shortly after. He watched it a few times. An enhanced envoy to alien civilizations. Who was confidentially overseeing their collection of Chitauri weapons. Not suspicious at all.</p>
<p>He tracked Natasha to the officer’s rec section, where she was having some downtime watching a ping-pong tournament among senior officers. She had her feet up and headphones on, bopping her head to whatever she was listening to while the cries of personnel bounced off the steel walls. Half the room turned when he walked in, but he kept his gaze on her only, and when she turned to see what everyone was looking at, he tapped his ear. She pulled her earphones and joined him out into the hallway.</p>
<p>He leaned against the wall and she came close, an inquisitive look in her eyes. </p>
<p>“Is there a clean window of time to hack Shield while we’re here on the Helicarrier? You said you could find better information on Richard Jones that way.”</p>
<p>She twisted her lips, raising a cautious but interested eyebrow. “Hm. Chancy.”</p>
<p>“Do it. We’ll deal with the consequences later.”</p>
<p>She nodded. Kept her eyes on him. He shook his head. </p>
<p>During the birthday party while he’d been dodging questions about Bucky’s letters, she’d said he’d come asking. And he knew he would. But he wasn’t ready to talk. Self-awareness had clarified his understanding of women like her. Hers was the Peggy type — way ahead of rubes like him. Their conversation wouldn’t be like the ones with Sam, and already sensing where she could help, he wanted to know well beforehand what he would say to her.</p>
<p>“It’ll be okay, Steve,” she said, confident as always. “Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”</p>
<p>He nodded his thanks. She pointed back toward the rec section and he lifted a hand, letting her go back to her tournament. He returned to lower decks. </p>
<p>— </p>
<p>But after hours prowling the Helicarrier’s innards, he found nothing. Their weapons cases were all accounted for, and he kicked at walls and listened quietly, and heard no echoes indicating hollow compartments or sections. If SHIELD was hiding any kind of alien tech onboard, they were doing a solid job of it.</p>
<p>Sam meanwhile was being discharged that evening. He went down to sick bay and stood beside Sam who was giving the doctor his one-of-us-is-crazy look for the instructions she was putting in her discharge orders. Sam had needed surgery, so bed rest, lots of sleep, no missions, then in a week or so, physiotherapy, which was something they’d had even in his day. So at Sam’s incredulous look at the doctor, he gently took the orders and assured her they’d be back for it. Sam had then looked at <i>him</i> like he was crazy, but he’d been at professional levels giving those looks as a six year old, so he’d walked Sam right up to quarters.</p>
<p>“Lie down,” he instructed, as Sam sat on his bed and looked at him like he was out of his mind. </p>
<p>“Steve, you need to get out of here.”</p>
<p>“Are you gonna lie down?”</p>
<p>“Maybe,” Sam said, almost laughing with disbelief and indignation.</p>
<p>He could have just shaken his head. What went around, really did come around. </p>
<p>“Listen, Thomas—”</p>
<p>“Oh-h,” Sam sputtered. “Go ‘head Grant.”</p>
<p>“You gotta recuperate,” he said, sounding so like Bucky that he felt his heart warming all over. “Trust me, the fact that science can have your arm mended in a week is a God honest miracle. So respect that. Wha’do I need to do?”</p>
<p>“Uhh . . . you can leave the order and . . . go.”</p>
<p>“I’ll get you some food. Wha’do you want.”</p>
<p>Sam sighed. And gave him a pretty healthy-portioned order. He smiled. Left for the cafeteria.</p>
<p>Yasmin loaded him a to-go pack, then told him he didn’t know he drank vodka. He ignored him and took the pack back to Sam. </p>
<p>Reentering, Sam was in fact lying down. And gave him a big smile when he entered with a pack and the small plastic bottle.</p>
<p>“You got the vodka.”</p>
<p>“Fastest way to recover,” he confirmed. “Just don’t get up, ‘cause you’re on medication.”</p>
<p>Sam laughed deeply. “Thank you, Captain America.”</p>
<p>“You’re welcome, Falcon.”</p>
<p>The door to Sam’s quarters slid closed behind him. And he only had to reach his own door to admit to himself that he had lost all desire to stay inside his quarters.</p>
<p>The saying went to be careful what you wish for, and that sure did apply to him. He’d spent all that time chasing a high of imagining him and Bucky getting physical, presuming how exciting it would be. Oh, he was getting exciting all right, and it was mentally turning him into a pretzel. His heart taking a beating. He found no relief in that kind of release, feeling worse, more lonely for Bucky when it was over. Even got to the point where he considered trying for Thor’s Connected Realm again, only to cut that thought short. The place was obviously even more complicated than Thor had portrayed, because he’d gone and brought back something very wrong, and he could understand now why it took high religious mediation and things like that as a guide in. He wasn’t trying it again.</p>
<p>So rather than lying in bed, brushing his knuckles across his lips, trying to recapture the feeling of a kiss, he finished up reports at his laptop, showered, and left his quarters for a midnight walk.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Strolling along the long, dim, empty corridors of their deck, he listened to the hum of the solar engines, and to the fainter background buzz of the quartered occupants of the deck. A pair of lower deck crew passed him, whispering quietly excited hellos, to which he nodded, but slowly continued his walk.</p>
<p>When, a corridor later, another pair of lower deck crew, who ought to be several decks below, once again passed him floating breathless hellos, and soon another one who simply pressed her lips tight and nodded at him, excitement barely contained, he figured word was out that he was on a walk. He supposed after three nights straight it was bound to happen. It would be a little while before it died down. After so many years of being with SHIELD, he’d honestly thought they’d all be over seeing him by now. But he guessed not. </p>
<p>But he didn’t mind the peeking at all. He was never interrupted, and he especially liked the walks which reminded him of his older teenage years, patrolling for street kids in those dark, dingy alleys and convincing them to come out of there. A hundred years into the future and he was somehow endowed with powers to carry on the fight. Not a bad wish that had come through for him.</p>
<p>No mistake, it was still the greatest of temptations to stay in his quarters. And when he returned it would be those amorphous dreams or that in-between state drowning in passions whose origins remained mysterious. What he would have wanted was another dream in which Bucky came to him, got in bed with him and talked as he had that night. But no, instead he was having phantom sex with himself.</p>
<p>He wanted none of that.</p>
<p>But he did want <i>something.</i> He could feel it, feel himself at an ending he didn’t know or understand. But an ending nonetheless.</p>
<p>So nights now, he barely slept.</p>
<p>Made worse by him and Natasha staying up late, leaned over the steel railings outside  armory and staring out at the night sky. Armory was where his uniform was mended in case of damage. A uniform he wore on missions because Nick said it was good for troop morale. And he was all for troop morale. It was also where Tony stored his Iron Man suit whenever on board.</p>
<p>But he and Natasha had taken up the location because it opened up to the rear of the Helicarrier — to the wishbone section, from where it was easiest to see any and all aircraft leaving the ship. </p>
<p>From where, a hacked comm softly announcing flight ops from her wrist wear, they’d taken to watching SHIELD airlift the prisoners they worked so hard to secure.</p>
<p>“Where do you think they take them?” she asked, four nights after he’d asked her to look into Richard Jones, and four days of watching Sam glare at his cast.</p>
<p>“No idea. I’m just as curious about who Shield feels can make them talk more easily than Natasha Romanov.”</p>
<p>She smiled.</p>
<p>“You been to see Sam?” he asked her. “He’s being really ornery about getting bedrest. Reminds me of someone I know.”</p>
<p>She nodded, snorting softly. “He told me. Said if he’d wanted a wife, he’d have married one.”</p>
<p>He shook his head. “But we’re gonna make sure he doesn’t do the wrong things?”</p>
<p>“Of course.”</p>
<p>“Cause I don’t wanna see him hurt.”</p>
<p>They watched a Jump Jet take off on yet another secret SHIELD mission, and she softly said, “You’ve a good heart, Steve.”</p>
<p>Watching the near invisible jet trail, he sometimes wondered. “I appreciate you saying that.”</p>
<p>She was silent. Waited until the jet disappeared from sight., then glanced at him. “Are you gonna talk about what’s going on with you?”</p>
<p>He lowered his head, eventually shook it. “I don’t know, Natasha.”</p>
<p>“Are you uncomfortable with your feelings about Bucky.”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“‘Cause . . . it would be a matter of crisis for a lot of people.”</p>
<p>“Crisis,” he said, turning back to the black skies. “I’ve seen crisis. This ain’t it.” </p>
<p>He lowered his head again, shook it. “I don’t know what’s going on with me. I don’t feel right. I don’t feel like myself.”</p>
<p>“When Sam said all of this was about letters Bucky Barnes wrote you during the World War Two, and Sam mentioned <i>the</i> girl, I made assumptions. But it didn’t take a roomful of intel to get that I’d misunderstood.”</p>
<p>He said nothing, hoping her assessment would help sort his own thoughts.</p>
<p>“You know I think you forget that Sam and I were on the Quinjet when we were getting everyone to safe places. When you were taking him to Wakanda. Even though he was pretty messed up by Hydra, it was a month of watching you two together.”</p>
<p>“And?”</p>
<p>“And it was . . . very . . . tender.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, a real heart-warmer. The clueless Army Captain fumbling the care of his best buddy.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” she said. Then, astonishingly, in a flawless imitation of him, “Ya’ right there Buck?”</p>
<p>He turned and stared at her.</p>
<p>She laughed, and then not helping matters at all, she spoke in Russian, with a wicked pull of her lips. He blinked at her while she went on laughing. “Bucky Barnes would understand.”</p>
<p>“Natasha,” he breathed. “Slow down. I’m just a kid a from Brooklyn.”</p>
<p>“It <i>was</i> heart-warming,” she said. “Captain America falls in love with the assassin know as the Winter Soldier. Click for details.”</p>
<p>“Whoa there,” he said, his heart skipping a beat to hear it said aloud. “Falls in love? Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself there?”</p>
<p>“Hush, you.”</p>
<p>And he shut up. Looked at her. “<i>You’re</i> not surprised?”</p>
<p>“That you fell in love with your best friend? No, Steve,” she said, nicely. “It doesn’t surprise me.” </p>
<p>“What’d you think of him,” he asked, realizing it had never crossed his mind to ask her. That this too might help.</p>
<p>“What’d <i>I</i> think of him?”</p>
<p>“Yeah. They teach you all kinds of . . . psychological mind stuff in the KGB—”</p>
<p>“They teach everyone in covert ops, Steve,” she said, laughing. “Not just us.”</p>
<p>“Fine. Spies are outta my league, not gonna lie. I mean, it was pretty scary the stuff Peggy would pass on from British Intelligence. It’s a different game from special forces, I’ll tell you that.” He glanced at her. “So talk to me. You said I’d come asking, and here I am.”</p>
<p>“What’d you wanna know?”</p>
<p>“I wanna know what you think of him,” he repeated.</p>
<p>“Well, I won’t lie to you, I found him incredibly distracting. Especially since he wasn’t trying to kill me, you know? All my life I’d heard of him, Similarity, we used to called him.” She paused, tipped her head. “Sounds better in Russian. But there he was on the jet, and it was . . . pretty exciting. If nothing else, he could certainly clear up a lot of gaps and missing pieces in fifty years of covert intel. So I’d say he was probably among the most distracting I’ve had to deal with on the jet.”</p>
<p>“Well, holy wow, Natasha. I’ll be sure to tell Bucky.”</p>
<p>She laughed softly. “But it didn’t take a minute, Steve.”</p>
<p>“What didn’t?”</p>
<p>“To know that I wasn’t in competition.”</p>
<p>“Ah,” he said. “Buck’s always had options. Competition is right. Maybe it’s why I never— saw myself in the running.”</p>
<p>“Steve,” she said blandly. “End that. Don’t be coy with me. When it comes to you and him, there is no contest happening, and you know that. Bucky Barnes’s got nothing in his head but Steve Rogers. Initially, I really did think it was programming, cause I’d never seen a lockout like that. But now I get it. You two go back far. And while I don’t know the details of your personal history, I gotta say, given the opportunity, you need to do right by that man.”</p>
<p>Around them, the stars winked, their light momentarily blotted out by the small craft continually coming and going around the Helicarrier. And he said nothing. Found himself imagining instead what teenage him would have been like being here with her. Getting her attention. That would have been months, nay, years of nights alone in his bed taken care of.</p>
<p>But him now was a different being. One’a dem worldly kids, he was now. Touch more aware that women like Natasha, Peggy, would always be a half century ahead of him. That in fact, when it came to Natasha, he didn’t belong in her century period. That if she smiled and kissed him, no different than Peggy, <i>he</i> ought to be looking over his shoulder at what was approaching and possibly the real source of interest in him.</p>
<p>Only in recent days had he been able to tear down Buck’s advice in the War regarding Peggy — for him to smile like a virgin at her. Because of course Buck too had been ahead of him, and had known what a woman like Peggy would find attractive in a guy like he’d been back then.</p>
<p>He knew now that he would never completely be at home with women like her. When Peggy, merely with a glance, had been able to see clearly the nature of his bond with Buck.</p>
<p>On her wrist wear, flight ops quietly announced the last of the prisoner transports cleared for takeoff. Seconds later, they watched the jet cross the night sky away from the Helicarrier. Watched until it was a pinpoint of star. </p>
<p>Natasha straightened from the steel railing, placing a warm hand on his shoulder as she left. “At the very least, you’ll have cute babies.”</p>
<p>— </p>
<p>The next morning, he got up with a nagging thought. Stood still at his bay windows waiting for the thought to click. When it did, he called a team meeting.</p>
<p>The meeting held in Sam’s quarters. Because he wasn’t having Sam getting out of bed, and Sam wasn’t having him and Natasha holding meetings without him. So compromise.</p>
<p>There he explained why he’d called the meeting. Telling Natasha how their conversation last night about interrogating detainees had stayed with him all night.</p>
<p>“Wait,” Sam said. “When did this happen.”</p>
<p>“Sam,” he said. “You’re bedridden.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Sam said loudly. “Not dead.”</p>
<p>Natasha waited, while Sam sent her a miserable side eye.</p>
<p>“Can I continue?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Sam groused.</p>
<p>“Right,” he said. “So that reminded me of what Maria Hill said when you asked her about interrogating our own prisoners, Tasha. How she said <i>he</i> can make them talk much more easily. You remember that?”</p>
<p>Natasha nodded. </p>
<p>He took a breath, but before he could, Natasha said, “They’re using Richard Jones to interrogate our prisoners.”</p>
<p>He nodded. Sam blinked.</p>
<p>“Has to be,” she said.</p>
<p>“Why would Shield call in someone so blatantly unbalanced for something as delicate as prisoner interrogations?” Sam asked. “I mean, based on what Steve’s described alone, I’d just be waiting for him to implode.”</p>
<p>He looked at Sam. “He’s not like that. He’s not that kinda crazy.”</p>
<p>“Okay, fine,” Sam said. “So what’s his Shield role?”</p>
<p>“He has to have a skill set no one else has,” Natasha said. And now she looked dead at him. “Any indication of what that might be, Steve?”</p>
<p>He took a moment, then realized that all the counter-intel measures the Army had drilled into special forces were useless against spies. From the start she had known something was up. And he wanted to get this guy. </p>
<p>So he said, “He can get inside your head. Like Wanda.”</p>
<p>Both Natasha and Sam fell silent. And mid-morning, above-atmosphere sunlight washing across their faces, they both looked actually shaken.</p>
<p>Reminding him that for the rest of normal humans, enhanced humans were ever an unknown, and therefore a frightening thought.</p>
<p>“What’d he do to you,” Natasha asked him, giving him a stare that asked for no obfuscation.</p>
<p>“He showed me how well he could get inside my head,” he said flatly. “And he doesn’t have the scruples of Wanda Maximoff.”</p>
<p>Both of them stared at him.</p>
<p>“Okay,” Natasha said, locking her arms around herself and looking out Sam’s bay windows. “Okay. I’ll wait for my tracer to bring in some answers.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>A day later, six after he’d set the task, Natasha’s tracer brought in . . . Well, long and short of it, not good.</p>
<p>She secured Sam’s quarters with some kind of radio and microwave disrupter, while Sam, who wasn’t in bed but in a chair, protested vocally that they should just hold the meeting in secure comms. Then him and Natasha pulled chairs, pointedly moving them over to the bed, at which Sam gave them a dark look.</p>
<p>Taking their seats, Natasha looked pale. The roots of her hair, which he had always thought of as an Irish red, were whitish. Noticing that detail was what had him paying attention almost even more than her words. She was frightened.</p>
<p>“I’ve uncovered two words,” she said softly. “Black, and order.”</p>
<p>In the silence that followed, Sam sending him a furrowed look, he said, “Those are pretty random words.”</p>
<p>“I know. But not as linked.”</p>
<p>“What’d you mean?”</p>
<p>“I mean that those words are attempted to be randomized. Which means they’re linked. Black . . . Order.”</p>
<p>Sam and him exchanged looks, shrugged at her.</p>
<p>She nodded. “I had nothin’ too. Until a third word kept popping in connection. Breakwater, the codeword translates to.”</p>
<p>Again, Sam and him shook their heads at her.</p>
<p>“Mole,” she said.</p>
<p>They stared blankly.</p>
<p>“Richard Jones, if he really is an envoy to alien civilizations for Shield, is a mole inside an alien organization named Black Order.”</p>
<p>Still they continued staring at her. She glanced at them, then said, “Yeah, doesn’t ring any bells with me either.”</p>
<p>“For what kind of information?” Sam asked.</p>
<p>“No records that I could find.”</p>
<p>“So Shield is using Richard Jones to find out anything it can on the Chitauri and their weaponry,” he said.</p>
<p>“I’d say so,” Natasha agreed.</p>
<p>“And they’ve also sent him as a mole to steal intel from this Black Order.”</p>
<p>“Looks that way.”</p>
<p>“So there’s a connection,” Sam said. “This Black Order people have something to do with the Chitauri, and Shield is sending Richard Jones to bring back intel.”</p>
<p>“Possibly,” Natasha said.</p>
<p>“Where’d you find all this?” he asked her.</p>
<p>Natasha sighed, hard. “That’s the scary part.”</p>
<p>“Wait,” Sam interjected, “we’re just getting to scary?”</p>
<p>Natasha paused, and he noticed as she uncharacteristically, though very slightly, bit her lip.</p>
<p>“I found the info in a set of supposedly defunct databases,” Natasha said.</p>
<p>“Databases on what?” he asked.</p>
<p>“For an old initiative. A planetary defense initiative.”</p>
<p>He looked at her, then at Sam, who returned his stare as if waiting for him to deny what he thought that meant.</p>
<p>Instead he turned and looked out Sam’s windows. “So Shield does think there’s a threat to Earth.”</p>
<p>All three of them were silent.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>They left Sam nearly ashen. Grim faced and shaking his head. “I don’t like the sound of this,” Sam said. “I’m not ready for any of this. I know we’ve been chasing alien weapons all this time, but I’ve never seen an alien my life. You know that, Steve?”</p>
<p>“No, I didn’t, actually,” he said, realizing.</p>
<p>“Exactly. You metahuman types are out of your minds. I don’t wanna see an alien. I assure you, for a normal human, seeing one on video is mind-squelching enough. And I’m not ready for this, Steve. I’m just not.”</p>
<p>No less pale, Natasha had soon left.</p>
<p>He stayed a while longer with Sam, trying to cheer him up. He didn’t know how well he succeeded. Only knew that at a point he had to let Sam get some sleep.</p>
<p>But first going over to Sam’s desk to check that the checkboxes on the doctor’s orders had been filled in for the day.</p>
<p>“Gooooo . . .” Sam moaned at him.</p>
<p>He turned to Sam. “<i>Do</i> you have a wife?” And Sam, to his credit, laughed. “Listen, look who you’re talking to,” he said. “If I didn’t think it was important, I wouldn’t bother you. Just rest, Sam. It’s a few days, maybe a couple weeks out of a hundred years of your life. You got time.”</p>
<p>Sam had turned his face up to ceiling and sighed dramatically. “Hate this!”</p>
<p>He smiled tp himself. “Maybe I don’t got the touch,” he said, leaving, then over his shoulder, “I’ll have Buck call ya.” The door slid shut on Sam’s baffled, “Huh?”</p>
<p>Inside his own quarters, staring into the night from his own bay windows, it took a really, <i>really</i> long time to acknowledge that he’d been staring at the pale moonlight on the serene night clouds in the hopes of seeing the Tree of Life.</p>
<p>Hope and dreading, but willing. </p>
<p>Because it had been as close as he’d come to true feelings of having Bucky with him. If he couldn’t manage any more dreams of Bucky in his bedroom, getting into bed with him and making him feel that he was back home, he’d take the authentic emotions from that Realm any day over the mysterious, fevered, physical pleasures.</p>
<p>He never once saw the Tree again. Of course he didn’t.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the repeated failure had him thinking about a few things. Starting with how far he’d come from just a month ago.</p>
<p>Seated at his desk, trying merely to access archives whose contents he’d had no <i>clue</i> what that would bring him.</p>
<p>How he’d sat there determined to look self-awareness in the face, while banishing the real pain underlying everything — that he’d been doing everything to not think about Wakanda.</p>
<p>Self-awareness on his own terms.</p>
<p>Well.</p>
<p>His version of self-awareness had been the simple dots and dashes of a Morse code letter back then, versus now, as the complex signals of the Native American Windtalkers who’d helped win the War.</p>
<p>Nine months, he’d spent — held out for nine months. </p>
<p>Nine months of not wanting to go back having to drop Bucky off in Wakanda. A name that invoked in him both emotional pain and joy. All wrapped up in five days. The strength of a hundred years of living barely making him face it.</p>
<p>But the truth was that self-awareness from Bucky’s letters had drained him.</p>
<p>His letters to Bucky had drained him.</p>
<p>These dreams had drained him.</p>
<p>There was, apparently, more to this life than even strength. His ma was probably among the strongest people he had known. And she had likely died no less of a broken heart.</p>
<p>With each passing day it got more difficult not to think about Bucky, his heart overflowing with things he wanted to say to him.</p>
<p>So what was life, if not letting those you loved know. That you loved them and would do anything for them. Of what practical use was a eulogy.</p>
<p>SHIELD was acting up. It wasn’t just him feeling it now. And things felt . . . weirdly urgent.</p>
<p>And it seemed he was wasting his life — their lives — waiting.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Around 1 a.m. or so, he left his quarters. Meaning to head to the cafeteria and hear whatever missive Yasmin had formulated for him this time. Only to step out and look to his right, because there was a guy standing at Natasha’s open doorway. </p>
<p>He looked away as Natasha and her guest kissed, waited until the guy was down the corridor, well out of earshot, and turned to her. She was leaning in her doorway, waiting for him to speak.</p>
<p>He said softly, “Can I talk to you?”</p>
<p>They went into the cafeteria.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, or maybe not, Yasmin took one look at Natasha and didn’t subject him to any tirades that night.</p>
<p>So they sat by the port side, looking at the sound-proofed repair deck. Tonight it was silent. No welding, no sparks flying. She began eating her sandwich, while he simply pushed aside his tray, and wouldn’t you know it, over at the counters Yasmin saw his action and registered dismay. Probably all set to take it personally. But tonight food could wait a little.</p>
<p>He waited until she’d eaten three sandwiches, those genetically modified apples the twenty-first century called fruit, downed some yogurt — tonight the flavor was supposedly Greek, which just made him shake his head at the audacity, recalling how one of the Novaks’ five adult daughters used to make fresh Greek yoghurt daily — drank her bottles of juice, and wiped her lips.</p>
<p>Then she seemed to look over and notice him. She breathed. “Sorry. It’s taxing for us normals.”</p>
<p>He smiled.</p>
<p>“You could use some,” she said lightly.</p>
<p>He scrunched up his face. “I’m holdin’ out.”</p>
<p>She laughed under her breath. Then said, “I’m listening.”</p>
<p>He leaned forward. “I just wanted to run something by you.” And taking a breath, he pushed out all the things — not that he was holding onto, but that were holding onto him. And making him feel that the universes itself worked in one way, when life, and everything he’d seen since walking into an Army experimental unit seventy years ago, had assured him that he absolutely needed to let all that go.</p>
<p>It was no longer Brooklyn, no longer New York. It was maybe even no longer Earth itself.</p>
<p>He knew that. He was a changed person, and he was more than ready to face that. </p>
<p>“I’m considering getting Buck out of stasis.” </p>
<p>He watched her eyebrows go up. And so waited. “Continue,” she said.</p>
<p>He nodded. “Bucky’s—” he dropped his gaze to their trays, not quite believing how hard it was to go there. But everything was over as far as he was concerned. He needed to say it all. “In about a couple months, Buck woulda been in stasis for a full year. If by then, nothing’s changed, I wanna get him out. I figured, and I know this is rich coming from me, but— life’s too short for this.”</p>
<p>“That is rich coming from you.”</p>
<p>“So— am I being selfish in wanting to do that. I don’t wanna be separated from Bucky anymore. It seems that . . . a lot of things are happening. A lot of signs. I know it’s not rational, but I remember the years leading up to the War. I remember there were people, Buck included, who felt something. And the rest of us were just clueless. And— while I can’t say I feel anything coming, cause I think it’s just— maybe I’m just tired of Shield.”</p>
<p>“Well, you’re not alone there.”</p>
<p>He looked her, but she had her eyes on her tray. “So . . . maybe for me,” he continued, “it’s just time. Maybe I need a break. But I don’t wanna have my needs interfere with what Shuri’s doing. It’s just that Buck’s been through a lot. Things I can’t imagine . . . and it might be time for me to step up and go take care of him.” </p>
<p>Finished, he waited.</p>
<p>She said nothing.</p>
<p>“What do you think?” he prompted.</p>
<p>She didn’t say anything still. Then, “Signs?”</p>
<p>“Maybe. Kinda.”</p>
<p>She finished up her tray. “Well, I’m the wrong person ask about signs and things like that. I can only give you practicalities. If you feel the same way at that twelve month mark, I’d say go for it.”</p>
<p>After a minute, he blinked, realizing that was it.</p>
<p>And she was right. It was that simple.</p>
<p>“I do have another question,” he heard himself saying, unaware until the words came out.</p>
<p>“Shoot.”</p>
<p>And as with so much in the last month, he forced the words out.</p>
<p>“What do I do if he’s the same way as when I left him? How do I handle it if he can’t go back to being the Bucky I knew?”</p>
<p>She directed her gaze at the silent repair section. It seemed an eternity before she spoke.</p>
<p>“Even when they break you,” she said. “When there’s nothing left inside you, there’s always something left. In fact, I think they leave nothing <i>but</i> the real you. The core of you, I guess. And Steve, that’s always a great place to start.” She stared into the partitioned section as if seeing a whole other world. “So my answer to you would be that if all you have is the core of him, I think you’re both on a good track for a new life.”</p>
<p>Silence settled like a warm blanket between them. Only making him aware of the fact when a handful of personnel noisily entered the cafeteria. Glancing over at them, he watched for a long moment as the young operatives found their way to the dispensing line. Where Yasmin was imperiously overseeing the small mob.</p>
<p>Bringing his gaze back to Natasha, he watched as she unpretentiously, unassumingly, finished her meal.</p>
<p>“Thanks, Natasha.”</p>
<p>“Any time.”</p>
<p>≈≈</p>
<p>And that night, seated on his window sill, he finally let himself think of Wakanda. Of those five days.</p>
<p>“He doesn’t like me,” Buck had said, on that their second morning.</p>
<p>The words had prompted him to follow Bucky’s gaze across the palace grounds toward where the King had been striding wherever in the company of his all-female guard.</p>
<p>It had been day two of delaying Buck’s return to stasis. His second day of wondering just how he was supposed to do that. How another sickening, involuntary separation was happening to them yet again, when it was so obvious that the universe itself had taken a person interest in them staying together. Even before he could consciously take himself back to the pier at Boston Harbor, it had been one of the defining moments of his life, informing their imminent separation without him realizing.</p>
<p>Day two of muting Shuri’s ever more persistent messages, asking, pleading, then threatening that he bring in Sergeant Barnes for “the procedure,” or else. Usually around mid-morning: <i>He will be all right; Captain, I promise that he is in good hands; My brother is going to kill me; Captain Rogers, you cannot continue this! Please just bring him in!</i> Then, the final set he’d simply ignored, <i>I swear by the Ancestors—!</i></p>
<p>He didn’t know what the swear was by the Ancestors. Only that he’d look at her messages and feel that he was going to throw up. Shredded by guilt that when it came to Bucky, he was continually messing up and failing Bucky. Buck who, without superpowers, had consistently saved his life. But now when it was his turn, he was as incompetent at caring for Bucky’s life as he’d been with his own ma’s.</p>
<p>Why otherwise had Buck fallen. How could he have let that happen? How useless could he actually be, especially now that he had reflexes “short of the lightning,” to hear Thor tell it.</p>
<p>Why, except that when it really mattered, he was actually no good at it.</p>
<p>“I don’t think you’d be here if he didn’t,” he’d replied Bucky. Buck had said nothing, compelling him to add, “Besides, even if he doesn’t like you now, it’s only because he and everyone else hasn’t gotten a chance to know you. You’ll be a superstar here.” </p>
<p>But seeing the worried look on Buck’s face, he’d looked again at the departing figure of the King. By the time T’Challa disappeared from view, he realized that Buck wasn’t worried, but rather resigned. Expectant. Including that whatever Bucky was resigned about, watching T’Challa, Bucky also seemed to have accepted.</p>
<p>Inside T’Challa’s office mere minutes after Buck had been put into stasis, and him wondering how his legs were still supporting him, he’d looked into the King’s eyes. Thanked him for his generosity, his hospitality, for everything.</p>
<p>But he had looked hard at T’Challa’s eyes. And said nothing aloud. Certainly nothing along the lines of <i>If Bucky doesn’t make it, it needs to have been purely from natural causes.</i></p>
<p>He didn’t believe in waging preemptive wars. Not when real ones were always waiting around the corner.</p>
<p>But he had gone to war all his life over things a billion times less important. </p>
<p>And the world could keep Captain America where Bucky was concerned.</p>
<p>T’Challa hadn’t taken his eyes off him. Slowly nodded. “We have an understanding, Captain.”</p>
<p>It hadn’t been a discussion needing to happen anyway. Not when T’Challa had been present in Siberia, waiting on the cliff outside of Hydra’s facility, long after Zemo had gone in, to see who among the three who’d followed in would emerge.</p>
<p>Not when T’Challa seemed to have realized, well before him, that he would have killed Tony Stark to protect Bucky. Or more precisely, he would have killed himself and Tony and anyone else to give Buck a chance at escape. Not an easy thing to accept about himself, and he wouldn’t have let himself off the hook had he done such a thing and survived. But he would have done it.</p>
<p><i>He’s my friend,</i> was all and how, expectant of death himself, he’d been able back then to convey it to Tony. <i>I</i> used to be your friend, Tony had answered, and even depleted it had almost made him laugh. Tony who had never grappled with the feeling that the world was ending for an entire generation and there was nothing they, just kids from neighborhoods, could do about it. All of them, who’d been made to toss aside their early adulthoods — their movie theaters  and street fairs and parties, their barrels of liquior, hot jazz and bomba numbers, their passionate, yet so innocent steamboat rides. Who’d left their guys and gals behind to go die in lands they’d never heard of.</p>
<p>To be forever gone.</p>
<p>Nothing to be done, not even if they played as hard, or as fair, or as smart as they could, loved and cared for one another as much as they could — there was no getting their arms around the thing. For their generation there would only be most of the men, if not all of them, returning home as steel dog-tags.</p>
<p>A world gone. Alive only in the person before him. With him. When he’d had less than nothing. Then to be loved enough by God and the universe to have it actually be your own person. Your Iron Man, your Falcon, your own personal Captain America, all rolled into one. Then to hand that person over, the impossibility of it.</p>
<p>Tony didn’t really know what a friend was, one to lay down his life for, and if Howard Stark’s son really lived a blessed life, Tony would never have to find out.</p>
<p>He wouldn’t wish that even on Arnim Zola.</p>
<p>Definitely, on the morning Buck was put under, it struck him as one of life’s  painful ironies that it took the king of a mythical kingdom to nod in understanding of what his own side could not. That his loyalty to Bucky was nonnegotiable. That he would start wars over Buck. And that the notion was without an expiration date.</p>
<p>He’d returned to Shuri’s lab right after to look at Buck in stasis. And he had cried his heart out. He really didn’t know how he had survived that kind of pain. Even swiped his face, expecting it to be wet.</p>
<p>But all he’d had at the time, feeling the loneliest he had ever in his life, was his Buck in a glass case. Frost over his skin, breathing — he’d checked like his own heart was connected. A heart rate monitor, logging steady across the display. Oxygen, everything else as steady as Buck himself. </p>
<p>He’d walked over and looked as closely as his enhanced sight would let him, at the consistency of Bucky’s skin under the cryogenic atmosphere, at the displays showing Buck’s cellular bonding structure holding. Things he would have bashed himself over the head in high school being forced to retain, sticking like magnets in his mind as he went over everything. He’d stayed all day, sure if he so much as turned his head things would go wrong. </p>
<p>Shuri certainly hadn’t appreciated. But he’d been her a hundred years before, and her spiked looks hadn’t bothered him at all.</p>
<p>“Captain <i>Rojaz,</i>” she’d bite out every so often. Only serving as a momentary reminder to move a little out of their way.</p>
<p>Morning — showered, dressed — he stood before Bucky’s glass stasis chamber, of itself challenging his science-fiction-teen mind not to see a cryogenic coffin. Rendering him unable to see much less answer hers or her lab techs’ prodding. “Move,” “Please move,”  “Move, please,” “Captain Rogers, would you mind moving, please.”</p>
<p>The struggle along to not think of it in morbid terms had had him nearly causing problems. </p>
<p>It was only their evidently near magical tech that had saved him from misbehaving. Only because T’Challa had, in such a causal yet fully aware manner, told him to bring him.</p>
<p>Each morning, standing before the bedroom mirror that had been Buck’s in the royal apartments they’d spent five days living and laughing in — and him sleeping on the couch after — waking and dressing, he’d ignored his own image. Because he wouldn’t be able to look at himself unless and until Buck made it.</p>
<p>Then it would be heading over to Shuri’s lab to stand and cry before Bucky’s glass chamber. What was he doing in a new century with a miracle, able body if he wasn’t able t care of Bucky?</p>
<p>For five days he had believed. That if he just talked, held his hand, pushed memories, touched, that somehow Buck would start healing on his own. Simply lift his marble eyes and say, “Th’ fuck, Steve? Th’ fuck’er we doin’ heya? Why you cryin’?”</p>
<p>And they’d have departed so fast, the slipstream would have sent jets off course.</p>
<p>But Buck hadn’t. Neither had Buck started healing on his own. He’d been on his own. Lost. Confused. Facing a terrible, hard reality of putting Bucky in a cold sleep for who knew how long, and it seemed an evil he’d wanted no part of.</p>
<p>It had been a decision well above his capacity.</p>
<p>Two days later, Natasha had sent a gentle message that she and Sam were back from Addis and could pick him up any time.</p>
<p>From that day, until now, he’d recorded Buck a message, whether he sent it or not.</p>
<p>But from that day a picture was forming. His sharpest memory of the time was always the same painful one. But rather than retreat in its face anymore, for nine months turning from the mere thought, he pressed a first to his chest and pressed on. Bucky in a chair before him, him pulled up to Bucky’s side, tending to Bucky’s missing arm.</p>
<p>How, he thought miserably now— how did Bucky have a missing arm. What right did the universe have to do that? Did it even understand? Bucky who had saved his life over and over. Who needed both arms more than Bucky Barnes?</p>
<p>How much had wanted to trade fates, that his could give his own arm for Bucky to have his back.</p>
<p>Talking to Bucky, he had tried to draw him in. Wishing that the want in his heart had been like a field Wanda Maximoff could effect. Into which they could both escape.</p>
<p>Talking to him, he’d thought anyway. Only to look up in the deep silence and see Bucky gone. There, but lost inside. Lost to him. A knife slicing open his heart would have been less painful. </p>
<p>He had not been the person to see that, to handle that. He hadn’t been the Steve back then to look up and see his superhero motionless, distant.</p>
<p>And he had known that if he put his arms around Bucky then, death itself would not make him let go.</p>
<p>He was drenched in a cold sweat when he finished scraping through the memories.</p>
<p>Seated on his window sill, staring out at the pale night sky.</p>
<p>It was raining. He could hear it falling on the planet, but here above the clouds, it was just sound.</p>
<p>Bucky’s steamboat in the sky.</p>
<p>And the one who had called it, who would most appreciate it, not mentally whole enough to enjoy it.</p>
<p>The droning hiss of rain sounded for a long time after. Peaceful, serene. </p>
<p>Until, suddenly, clear forks of lighting lit up the sky. And for a moment he held his breath, looked across the sky, thinking Thor was arriving.</p>
<p>But no such thing happened.</p>
<p>A long time later, he realized it hadn’t been anything except what he didn’t even believe in — a sign.</p>
<p>He didn’t need another two months to make his decision. He only needed the time to pass so that he could land a jet in Wakanda.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>He was asleep. That he knew. And he was dreaming. At least . . . he had to be dreaming.</p>
<p>So he wasn’t entirely sure how he was now in the Connected Realm. Because Thor had said being in the Realm was never a dream, but instead perfectly real.</p>
<p>And the last time, he hadn’t quite known how he’d come upon the rock outcropping to be looking out across the golden grassland. But now none of that seemed applicable.</p>
<p>He was standing now at what seemed a cave mouth, staring through it at the golden landscape. Seeing the daunting sight of that massive Tree.</p>
<p>Stumped, as much to find himself there as anything, he looked around. But behind him was darkness. Rock and nothing else. Not even an exit as far as he could see. Onward seem to be the only option. And even so he might have remained where he stood until something showed itself.</p>
<p>But the lightning across the world before he’d fallen asleep had seemed a harbinger to the dream. So he moved forward toward the cave mouth. Clearing its entrance, he looked out onto the golden world and saw Bucky standing there. Just meters from where he’d exited the cave.</p>
<p>Of course, he stared.</p>
<p>He’d never been inside a dream and felt that he was awake, fully conscious, and that what he was seeing should make him question his own mind.</p>
<p>But he knew he was in a dream.</p>
<p>And that he was in fact awake, and fully conscious. </p>
<p>And that he would only question his own mind at his own dire stupidity.</p>
<p>Bucky was standing just meters away, at the edge of the rock outcropping he’d stood on himself the first time he’d been there.</p>
<p>Bucky was smiling at him.</p>
<p>No, not smiling. </p>
<p>Buck had tears in his eyes.</p>
<p>And looked . . . </p>
<p>He stood as still as the day itself, staring at the person he knew could not be looking at him.</p>
<p>Bucky looked as beautiful and as healthy as a spring morning. No distortions, clear as sight. His hair was cut to just beneath his jaw, his arm covered in the type of waterproof looking material he’d been seeing in his dreams. </p>
<p>Buck was dressed in cargos and a T-shirt, but had a big, multicolored scarf around his neck and shoulder. Like how he had seen on Wakandans when he’d dropped Bucky off.</p>
<p>Had he said Bucky looked beautiful. And healthy, and— </p>
<p>“Hey, you,” Bucky breathed hoarsely. </p>
<p>His feet seemed to have lifted off the ground, taking the place of where his head should be.</p>
<p>He stood there, staring at Buck’s smiling, glistening eyes, Bucky’s tightening expression. “How are’ya, Steve?”</p>
<p>If this was a dream, he was going to die here. </p>
<p>And it was a dream, because try as he might, he couldn’t move toward Bucky. </p>
<p>“Can you see me?” he asked, intently, and Bucky nodded, swallowed. “Why can’t I come to you?” he asked him.</p>
<p>“We can’t,” Bucky said thickly, his alluring blue eyes on him like a warm blanket.</p>
<p>“Why not?” he asked directly, untrusting of whatever world he was presumably existing in at the moment.</p>
<p>“I don’t know.”</p>
<p>And they stood there, staring at each other. Him feeling like nothing he had ever experienced in his entire life, like an earthquake was taking place inside him that he was trying to prevent by just holding Bucky’s eyes.</p>
<p>“Steve,” Bucky cried softly, his eyes almost physically flooding him with love and attention. “Jesus Christ. Look at you.”</p>
<p>And as if he was having a heart attack, he slowly realized that he was seeing Bucky— </p>
<p>He had no breath to say it. “Are you awake?”</p>
<p>Bucky seemed unable to speak, nodded again and again.</p>
<p>His breathing had stopped, his movements. He was looking at Bucky. </p>
<p>This wasn’t a dream.</p>
<p>He held Bucky’s eyes. Bucky looked right back at him.</p>
<p>He opened his mouth, and on a suspended breath said, “I’m on my way.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Waking to the morning sunshine blasting against the drawn gauze of his window blinds, he was on his back, slowly opening his eyes. Staring darkly at the dark dome on his desk.</p>
<p>He was sick of these dreams. Sick of everything. But laid there feeling his heart on fire. Feeling tears that wouldn’t fall. Eventually he got up and went to shower. Before leaving his quarters, he still, like a hopeless case, passed by his desk and glanced at the dome. Of course not. No he didn’t have any messages. In nearly ten months, he’d never had a single message.</p>
<p>Their next mission was planned for a couple days’ time. Sam, on pain gels and slinged up, and moving conspicuously slowly, like trying to head off any comments, was standing in the Quinjet’s cargo bay, logging into a terminal.</p>
<p>He didn’t even bother ragging on Sam. He’d scanned and retained the doctor’s orders, and as long as they’d kept Sam off his feet and not using that arm for a good five days, Sam was good. The rest was just going to be gripey attitude. That, he could handle.</p>
<p>“See you’re respecting the doctor’s orders.”</p>
<p>“It’s an arm, Steve. I can actually take it anywhere.”</p>
<p>He said nothing, rubbed his eye, looking at his pad and trying to pull his thoughts together. </p>
<p>Until he realized Sam had sassed him back but not stopped looking at him. He glanced over. </p>
<p>Sam was staring at him.</p>
<p>“What?” he asked, a little more sharply than maybe he ought to. But he simply wasn’t feeling all that great.</p>
<p>“Nothing,” Sam said, but went on looking at him. Looking like he was suppressing both worry and confusion. Looking muddled. “I just thought— we’d be burning a hole through the atmosphere by now.”</p>
<p>“Why, what happened.”</p>
<p>After a long silence, he remembered they’d been talking, and glanced at Sam. </p>
<p>Sam blinked and stared back. As did he.</p>
<p>Sam said, “You . . . have a message from— ”</p>
<p>But he gone.</p>
<p>He smashed right through the flight deck doors, sending personnel plastering themselves against the walls as he flew straight down the corridor — dropped himself down several flights of stairwell instead of taking the stairs, and on their deck tore to his quarters. He pushed through the retracting doors and ended his flight at his desk like he’d reached the end of the world.</p>
<p>Shaking all by himself in a storm, he stared down at the dome, realizing in an instant that he didn’t know whether it only sent messages or whether it was a live two-way communicator. But of course it would be a two-way communicator, it— </p>
<p>It was glowing. It was amber. Inside it was a green light he had never seen. Beneath the green dot, in small letters—</p>
<p>
  <i>Shuri’s Miracle is: ONLINE.</i>
</p>
<p>He slammed the dome so hard the glass cracked. He didn’t know how to make it work.</p>
<p>“Buh- buh- <i>Bucky. Buck!</i>”</p>
<p>“Hey, Steve.”</p>
<p>He sat down so hard his steel chair dented.</p>
<p>“Is- is- is there visual!”</p>
<p>“Why don’t you just get down here, bud.”</p>
<p>“<i>Jesus Christ,</i>” he wailed.</p>
<p>Bucky laughed, low, kindly.</p>
<p>Just as he remembered him.</p>
<p>“Natasha said the Helicarrier’s somewhere over Buenos Aires,” Bucky said. Smoothly, calmly. “And that a Quinjet can be here in eight hours. Eight hours it is, Steve.”</p>
<p>He just blinked at the dome, like it had come to life and was talking to him in Bucky' voice.</p>
<p>“<i>Bucky,</i>” he keened at it. “<i>Buck.</i>”</p>
<p>Bucky only laughed. “Right here, Steve. Come on, you can do it. Seven hours . . . and fifty-nine minutes. And counting.”</p>
<p>He hurtled into the Quinjet in lift-off, as Natasha was closing the landing ramp.</p>
<p>•</p>
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